Blackberry Reviews

We know it is too late to discuss about the blackberry 7290, but it was once one of the best-selling widely used smartphones. This model has certainly been blown away by the successive and successful 8000 and 9000 series. The Blackberry 7290 belongs to the RIM’s 7200 series. The 7200 series was the sucessor to the 7100 series which aimed only at individuals and not on corporates and hence they had a better form-factor. They still prove to be a great device for mailing, and particularly texting.

Built:

The BlackBerry 7290 PDA Phone was designed especially for the business people. It is its bulky form-factor that puts most of the people away from it. It has a dimension of 11.3 x 7.4 x 2 cm (H x W x D) and weighing 133 grams, yes, as you can imagine, it is a big one, compact in no means. The phone comes in a metallic blue colour which certain users find as attractive and some others frown at it immediately.

Display:

Talking about the display, this Blackberry phone has a good 240×160-pixel resolution supporting  more than 65,000 colours. With the above features, the display is quiet bright and colourful.

Simple layout:

The RIM can always boast its simplicity and in regard to that, the 7290 Smartphone from Blackberry is a perfect example. The track wheel and the escape button is placed on the right side of the phone which restricts the usage of the phone to right handers. Both these units are the most commonly used ones in the phone as they are equivalent to a stylus in a PDA or a mouse in your PC. The track wheel is moved up and down to scroll through the items and has to be pressed in case a selection has to be made. The left hand side of the phone has the USB port.

The battery is placed in the rear side of the phone with a removable battery cover and the SIM card is placed below the battery similar to all other mobile phones. The LED on the top of the device is used to indicate a lot of things. There is no LED indication for charging, Bluetooth or radio as available in a lot of other smart phones. The phone also sports a tiny IrDA window over its top and a headset jack in its side. The top of the device also has a dedicated button that allows you to retrieve the information of the latest calls list.

A small comparison:

This model looks very similar to its predecessor 7230 some of the differences being the addition of Bluetooth, three backlight settings and a smaller round backlight button. As mentioned earlier, the 7100 series had a smaller form factor with a much smaller screen and lesser number of keys.

The keyboard:

Similar to its other traditional PDA Blackberry predecessors, 7290 uses a QWERTY keyboard which includes the 26 alphabetical keys, a space bar, two alpha shift keys, a numeric shift key, an enter key, a delete key and a symbol key. The keyboard is backlit for its efficient usage in darker areas. Depending on your needs of power consumption, you can change the backlight from anywhere between 10 seconds to 2 minutes. The keys on the left side are overlaid with numbers. The other keys represents and does what it is suppose to do in a conventional keyboard except for the symbol key which when pressed displays a list of special characters. The spacing between the keys is sufficient enough and hence typing can never be an issue.

The applications:

Desktop:
The applications of the BlackBerry 7290 Handheld PDA can be managed using the desktop manager though most of the applications are built-in. While you are in the home screen, pressing any of the numeric will automatically take you to the phone dialer.  The ability to set a password for your phone is a very useful feature and protects your phone from a few prying eyes.

7290 must be appreciated for the amount of information it gives on its status. A lot of important stuffs such as the battery level, signal, PIN and IMEI numbers are available. The Bluetooth icon also appears when switched on and changes its colour from grey to blue once the Bluetooth radio is switched on which is interesting and useful.

Games:
Some of the games that are available in the phone are really exciting specially the brick breaker. You can also download a lot of other games such as pub checkers and disco bowling for free.

Browsing and mailing:
The browser in the phone is said to work fairly but the size of the screen may be a disadvantage. This smartphone is particularly very good for mailing purposes and it also supports push email from a network provider or a corporate server.

Email is one of the major functionalities of this corporate phone. Unlike the other smartphones, the RIM BlackBerry 7290 mobile phone does not use the convensional mailing system and rather it uses Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) and a personal user can sign up in to a similar scheme which is known as the Blackberry Internet Services (BIS) with his network provider. But one of the major loop hole that is involved with system is that, you may experience problems with junk mails, quotas and attachments.

Miscellaneous applications:
When it comes to the expectations of the smartphone as a corporate, the word and excel applications are a must, it is absent though. The phone’s integration with outlook is smart, clever and satisfying. The other minor applications such as the address book, calendar, tasks, alarm clock and memo pad are present. As is the case of most of the mobiles, BlackBerry 7290 from RIM also has a lot of preloaded 32 polyphonic ringtones but not that useful ones. The vibrate mode is also available in the phone.

Memory and address book:
BlackBerry 7290’s address book is limited by the available memory, and the device comes with 32MB of flash memory along with 4MB of SRAM. Each contact can hold up to 8 phone numbers, an e-mail ID and two postal addresses. Additionally you can also enter URSs, personal information and notes under each name. one of the major disadvantage that RIM has carried over to 7290 also is the lacking of an expansion slot. Another irritating fact is that is also lacks speaker phone, but as a compensation, the Bluetooth can be connected with the headset.

The most irritating facts:

The USB port in BlackBerry 7290 can be used for both data transfer and charging. But we have to mention something funny yet a serious issue about the USB port. The 7290 can be charged only by a PC and it cannot draw power from the USB port until a data connection is established… ridiculous. This not only places severe restrictions on the way that the device can be charged, but ruins the concept of “charging” altogether.

Removing and reinserting is the only means by which the phone can be reset and the device also takes several minutes to reboot which drives you mad if you have to swap SIM cards on the fly.

The battery life is an average four hours of talk time and nine days of stand-by time.

Verdict:

The RIM blackberry 7290 is a fairly priced mobile. There are a wide range of better choices in the current market. If you are not really worried about the above said disadvantages, and mailing is your sole purpose, then you may opt for 7290.

RIM BlackBerry 7290 Smartphone - Technical Specifications, Features

Other Blackberry Phone Reviews

• Blackberry Curve 8350 Review
• BlackBerry 7100g Smartphone Review
• BlackBerry Curve 8310 Review
• Blackberry Bold 9000 Review
• Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220 Review