Blackberry 8300 Curve

There was a time, not so very long ago, when a Blackberry was strictly about business. The devices were good at pushing your emails to you on the go, and (so long as you could get your head around their idiosyncratic keyboard layout) they were pretty good at sending them, too. But that was about it.

These days, there's a Blackberry for almost all of us, and the 8300 Curve is the guy everyone wants to know at the party. For our money it's better looking than Blackberry's last catwalk contender, the Pearl, is just as slim, and weighs but a smidgeon more. It's also the smallest and lightest Blackberry with a full QWERTY keyboard – a must for those who never converted to the Blackberry keyboard way of life.

There's a rather lovely screen that's bright and clear both in video viewing and gaming modes, and a 2-megapixel camera with 5x digital zoom and flash. Unusually, it won't record video, but you can watch video on it, and once connected by USB cable to your PC, it's easy to drag-and-drop video files – the syncing software will offer to convert AVI, DivX and WMV files to MPEG4 for you.

There's a decent music player on there too, for AAC, MP3 and WMV files. All you need, really.

Gaming however has never been a priority on Blackberries, and while there's fun to be had with this model, it doesn't have games in its soul.

That full QWERTY keyboard really is of the 'hen-peck' variety – tiny keys that can really only be reliably pressed with the tip of the thumbnail. The D-pad, too, takes a bit of getting used to. It's more like a trackball on a laptop, so you don't physically press it, you just kind of rub your thumb over its rubberised surface to get movement. There's a high-pitched ratchet sound to give you some feedback and it's very fast.

This comes in handy on the only supplied game, BrickBreaker, a good-looking Blockbusters clone, but we found it didn't always come into play on some of the other games we downloaded. In fact, the controls turned out to be a tad idiosyncratic on most of these. 3D Attack Chopper 2, for instance, had odd combinations like '4' to go left, '5' to go right – not good.

The sound quality from the large speaker on the back is excellent though, and you can add stereo Bluetooth headphones if you're so inclined.

Away from its gaming handicap, the Curve has a lot going for it, such as the ability to view Word, Excel, PDF, and JPEG attachments, a 64MB memory with the option of expanding it with a microSD card (128MB supplied), and the customary long battery life that all Blackberries seem to have as standard. Despite the lack of 3G internet connection (there's only a WAP browser) and wi-fi, it's a beautiful little device for staying in touch, even if it won't do a great job of entertaining you on your own.