“BlackBerry Style 9670 (Sprint)” |
| BlackBerry Style 9670 (Sprint) Posted: 02 Nov 2010 10:21 AM PDT
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The BlackBerry Style for Sprint is the best flip smartphone you can find right now, and it's a pretty terrific messaging phone all around. It's unusual to find flip-style smartphones, and many of the ones we do see aren't great. Hence the name, the Style is a stylish (and easy) way to get your messaging done without having to worry about scratching up a big touch screen in your pocket or purse. It may not be the ultimate super-phone, but it'll appeal to plenty of people. Physical Features and Phone Calls The front of the Style is dominated by a big 2-inch, 320-by-240-pixel color screen. Most of the time, it's a large analog clock with various status indicators around the edges. When you get an e-mail or text message, it pops up a preview before returning to the clock. Unfortunately, you can't play video on the external screen or use it as a camera viewfinder. Flip open the Style to find a 2.7-inch, 360-by-400-pixel TFT LCD screen and a full BlackBerry keyboard, complete with a slightly raised touch pad. The keyboard feels flatter and more membrane-like than previous BlackBerries, but it's still usable. Running on Sprint's 3G CDMA network, the Style is an excellent voice phone, with one exception: a seriously lagging reception indicator. The phone showed two bars at one point when I had no signal, and at another point it showed weak 1X coverage when I had strong EVDO coverage. That doesn't affect call quality, but it's a misleading. Voice calls sounded absolutely terrific—loud and rich without distortion. There are even options to bump up bass or treble during calls. The speakerphone is loud and clear, although it doesn't work with the flip closed—a missed opportunity, for sure. The Style paired easily with my Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars), including activating the accurate, Nuance-powered voice dialing. Talk time was acceptable at 5 hours, 17 minutes. Like many BlackBerrys, the Style excels in standby time; I got more than two days with this phone. BlackBerry 6 OS and Software We go into some detail about the new operating system's features in our BlackBerry 6 OS review, but the lack of a touch screen changes things a bit. Without the touch screen, the Style is dependent on its trackpad, which is calibrated to be a bit slippery. It takes a bit of practice to avoid overshooting your mark. The Style's strength is messaging, of course; this is a BlackBerry. The Style integrates various e-mail accounts, IMs, BBMs, texts, Facebook and Twitter direct messages into a single inbox, also offering an option to see your messages in separate mailboxes. E-mail massages are pushed to the phone reliably, unless you're a consumer Microsoft Exchange user without a BlackBerry server (RIM's one remaining, annoying messaging weakness.) Web browsing can be frustrating on the Style. While the BlackBerry 6 browser is faster and more accurate than previous BlackBerry browsers (especially over Wi-Fi 802.11n), it's still slower than the Apple and Android browsers, and Web pages can look insanely tiny on the very tight screen. There's just a lot of scrolling and zooming involved. Sprint packed some custom software on the Style. The Sprint Music Store doesn't work yet, but it's been fairly useless for its several years of its existence, with an awkward UI and awful DRM. Sprint TV gives you a broad set of streaming television channels for $9.99 per month including plenty of content for children, but it doesn't work over Wi-Fi. Sprint Navigation gives you spoken, GPS-based driving directions including traffic, though I wish it worked with the external screen. RIM's BlackBerry App World app store is faster than it used to be, but it still has far fewer than the Apple and Android stores do. At the time of this review, there were only 158 games available for the Style. RIM's set of big-name apps seems to run behind even the brand-new Windows Phone 7 platform. Multimedia Music sounds great through wired or Bluetooth headphones. For videos, make sure you use BlackBerry Desktop to sync them, because BlackBerries are a bit picky about their file formats and resolutions. H.264 videos with 640-by-480 or lower resolution worked fine. The screen's portrait form factor puts big black bars around videos, though, and there's no way to rotate the videos to play in wide-screen mode. There's no YouTube app; it's just a Web link. The Style's 5-megapixel camera could be better. Its awkwardly placed, so it's easy to cover it with your thumb. The continuous autofocus can make for some blurry pictures if you don't wait a second or so for it to lock in. And images are a little bit dark, and show slightly too much color noise. It's not hideous by any means, but there's better out there. The video mode takes 640 by 480 videos at 20 frames per second with a slight pulsing effect; that's behind the 30fps we see on top-of-the-line Android and Apple phones. Conclusions Ultimately, you'll really decide on the BlackBerry Style based on its flippiness. If you're a Sprint subscriber and you insist on a flip-style phone, the Style is a good choice. Compare the BlackBerry Style 9670 (Sprint) with several other mobile phones side by side. More Cell Phone Reviews: This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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