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BlackBerry 7130c
3 out of 5Average user rating :
BlackBerryManufacturer :
August, 2006Date :
-Price :
3321Hits :
1User opinions :
Research in Motion's BlackBerry 7100 series was a new direction for the company, offering its customers a more compact and consumer-friendly device with the familiar BlackBerry functionality. The line has continued to evolve over the past year, and its latest model, the RIM BlackBerry 7130c, is a winner. It offers many of the features found in its siblings, such as a speedy Intel processor, robust e-mail capabilities, a sharp screen, and Bluetooth, but it also boasts a more refined and lightweight form factor that makes it the best-designed model we've seen to date. You may be thinking, "Great, it has a nice design, but how does it perform?" The answer: very well. It's an excellent phone and e-mail device with EDGE capability and a vast range of features. The RIM BlackBerry 7130c is a great smart phone for mobile professionals and consumers alike who need to stay connected on the road. It's now available through Cingular for a fair price of $199 with a two-year contract.
The RIM BlackBerry 7130c has a great design, plain and simple. Though the 7100 series has always had a compact form factor, the BlackBerry 7130c most closely resembles a candy bar phone in look and feel. It's sleek (4.5 by 2.1 by 0.7 inches) and incredibly light (4.2 ounces), which makes it comfortable to hold up to your ear for conversations. As a bonus, the handset is attractive, with an appealing silver and midnight blue color scheme. The 7130c's 2.25-inch (diagonal) screen dominates the face of device and displays 65,000 colors at 240x260 resolution. It's not quite the 320x240 pixels of its full QWERTY cousin, the BlackBerry 8700c , but the 7130c still shows off sharp images and text. It's also equipped with light-sensing technology that automatically adjusts the backlighting depending on your environment, and unlike that of many other phones, the display is readable in sunlight. Customization options are plentiful, including the ability to change the backlight time and the font family, style, and size, as well as to turn antialiasing on or off.
Navigating the phone's menus is simple, thanks to the 7130c's intuitive controls. Below the screen are the Send and End keys for making calls and a center convenience key that you can program to open any application. Below those buttons, you'll find the SureType keyboard that's present on all devices in the 7100 series. This modified QWERTY keyboard features two letters per button (the number keys share space with the keys in the three center columns) and works with SureType technology, which, like predictive text, guesses the word you're typing after you input the first couple of letters. Admittedly, we've never been huge fans of SureType, preferring the ease and speed of the full QWERTY models, but we're so enamored by the compact form factor that we're willing to make that compromise. The keys themselves are well spaced and adequately backlit. On the left spine, there is a 2.5mm headset jack, a mini USB port, and another customizable Convenience key, while the familiar trackwheel and Escape button are on the right spine. All these controls make it easy to operate the 7130c with one hand. There's a power button and a mute key on top of the device and a small notification LED on front. Finally, the speakerphone is located on the back. Cingular packages the device with a number of basic accessories, including a wired headset, a travel charger, a USB cable, a belt holster, a CD containing the BlackBerry Desktop software, and reference material. Just because the RIM BlackBerry 7130c is small in size doesn't mean it skimps on features. Like the latest BlackBerrys, the 7130c is powered by a speedy Intel processor, and it comes with 64MB of flash memory and 16MB of SDRAM. The phone book is limited only by the available memory, and for each contact, you can store up to eight numbers, home and work addresses, a Web URL, notes, and more. For hands-free calls, you can use the speakerphone, which can be activated only once you're on a call, or you can wirelessly connect to a headset, thanks to the 7130c's integrated Bluetooth.
As always, e-mail remains at the forefront of the smart phone. For business users, the BlackBerry 7130c is compatible with Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, and Novell Groupwise, so with the help of your friendly IT department, you can set up your device to receive corporate e-mail in real time. In addition, you can access up to 10 POP3/IMAP accounts and use the included Internet browser to check Web-based e-mail, such as Yahoo and Gmail. For our tests, we logged onto the BlackBerry Internet service using our PC and entered our SBC Global account information. The process was painless; within a few minutes, we received an activation confirmation e-mail on our 7130c, and we started getting e-mail messages within 20 minutes. If you receive attachments with your e-mail, no problem--the 7130c can open and view Word and Excel documents, PDFs, images, and more. The EDGE support also helps to reduce download times. Despite these great e-mail capabilities, we're disappointed that the 7130c doesn't come with an onboard instant-messaging client. You can, however, download BlackBerry Messenger and GoogleTalk for free from BlackBerry's Web site --it's an extra but minor step. The 7130c also handles text and multimedia messages. Other features on the RIM BlackBerry 7130c include a WAP 2.0 Web browser, a calendar, a task list, a calculator, a memo pad, and an alarm clock. Like all BlackBerrys, however, the 7130c is a business-oriented device, so multimedia features are sparse. There's no camera or MP3/video player, though the absence of the former will suit users who work in security-conscious environments. The only source of entertainment is the standard BrickBreaker game. Of course, you can download more games and applications for your amusement and use. For example, our test unit came loaded with extra apps, such as Texas Hold'em King and PocketExpress. We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; EDGE) RIM BlackBerry 7130c in San Francisco using Cingular's network, and call quality was excellent. Voices sounded clear with ample volume, and our callers reported the same. They added that they couldn't even tell we were using a cell phone. Turning on the speakerphone diminished the sound only slightly, but still, we give it high praise. And we had absolutely no problem pairing the 7130c with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset ; we had them connected in less than a minute. The Web-browsing experience on the 7130c was good. With EDGE support, Web pages loaded quickly, as did e-mail attachments. We had no problems opening up Word documents or JPEG images on the device. The RIM BlackBerry 7130c is rated for 4 hours of talk time and up to 18 days of standby time. In our tests, the 7130c beat the rated talk time by an hour. According to FCC radiation tests , the 7130c has a digital SAR rating of 1.09 watts per kilogram. The best-looking BlackBerry yet makes a convincing claim as the premier personal e-mail phone. The BlackBerry 7130c combines race-car–like lines with excellent e-mail compatibility and decent phone prowess, making it a great jumping-on point for folks who haven't yet taken the phone e-mail plunge (as long as they don't use Yahoo! or Hotmail). The 7130c looks positively great. It's a rounded rectangle measuring 4.2 by 2.2 by 0.8 inches and weighing 4.2 ounces, with well-separated little keys and a bright 240-by-260 color screen that looks terrific in sunlight. The keyboard is RIM's SureType hybrid, which has two letters on most keys and uses a very good predictive text system to decide which one you want to type. It takes about 15 minutes to get used to, and then it's fine. Once you e-mail on a BlackBerry, you'll wonder why all devices don't work this well. Cingular's BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS) Web page lets you integrate up to ten e-mail accounts—either POP3 / IMAP , Microsoft Exchange (via Outlook Web Access) or Lotus Notes, though sadly not Yahoo! or Hotmail. T-Mobile's BlackBerrys support Yahoo!, so Cingular needs to get on the ball. BIS automatically figured out the settings for my vanity domain name, saschasegan.com. Unlike previous versions of BIS, the new BIS 2.0 draws directly from source mailboxes rather than storing mail at Cingular. On the good side, that means you don't have a message limit any more. On the bad side, it means you can't manage messages on the BlackBerry through the Web interface. E-mail accounts appear as separate mailbox icons on the 7130c's home screen, as well as in a consolidated mailbox combining all the e-mail accounts with SMS and MMS . Microsoft Word, Excel, and PDF attachments are viewable with their formatting stripped; you can also view thumbnails of PowerPoint presentations, and see JPEG and TIFF graphics attachments. MP3 attachments, alas, are unplayable. A third-party editor for Word and Excel files, eOffice from DynoPlex, costs a painful $119.95, but at least it exists. Like other BlackBerrys, the 7130c syncs with PCs through a desktop application or with Macs via the free (albeit buggy) PocketMac for BlackBerry to copy over calendars, notes, tasks, and addresses from a range of desktop PIMs . Corporate users with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server can also sync PIM info over the air, but there's no such option for individuals. Two major upgrades separate the 7130c from its predecessors such as the 7105t and 7100g . Unlike the previous models, the 7130c uses EDGE rather than the much slower GPRS network. Tethered to a laptop as a modem, I got very respectable speeds of 99 to 170 Kbps. That means faster attachment delivery and speedier Web surfing. The 7130c also has a 312-MHz Intel processor, like its cousins the 8700g , 8700c , and 7130e . That's just now beginning to enable new, media-rich applications like Sona Mobile's BlackBerry Media Player. News clips downloaded through the free player were slow and blocky, but they worked. As a quad-band world phone, the 7130c is decent if not great. Reception is good, and battery life is terrific, at 10 hours 25 minutes of talk time. The speakerphone is powerful. But I heard some volume fluctuations and occasional dropouts in the earpiece, and transmissions sounded scratchy with a lot of background noise coming through. A Plantronics Voyager 510 Bluetooth headset connected without a problem, and MP3 ringtones (which you have to buy from Cingular) are loud. A few missing features irritate me. No BlackBerry has ever had voice dialing. The 7130c lacks a camera and MP3 player. And although there's a perfectly decent Web browser, the 7130c doesn't have an IM client. You can download free Google Talk, AIM , Yahoo! Messenger or ICQ clients, but to get MSN or a single multiplatform client you must buy commercial software costing anywhere from $20 to $50. At $29.99 per month on top of a voice plan, Cingular's BlackBerry data plan will be too rich for some people's blood. But it's $10 cheaper than Cingular's data plan for the Palm Treo 650 or Verizon's plan for the Motorola Q . Only T-Mobile's plans cost less. The 7130c's nearest competitors are RIM's own 8700c on Cingular, the BlackBerry 7130e on Sprint and Verizon, and the T-Mobile Sidekick 3 . The 8700c has a better screen and a full keyboard, but otherwise works the same as the 7130c; you should make your buying decision based on form factor. The 7130e is just like the 7130c, but much faster at Web surfing and not quite as pretty; of course, you may not want to switch to Sprint or Verizon. The Sidekick 3 is a cuddlier device, with a full keyboard, camera and an MP3 player, but its complete inability to hook up to corporate e-mail will doom it for many professionals. Maybe that's the true niche for the attractive 7130c: It's a Sidekick for people with jobs. The BlackBerry 7130c™ provides complete features and functionality, including:
The good: The RIM BlackBerry 7130c sports a very sleek and compact form factor, as well as a solid feature set that includes Bluetooth, EDGE support, and a speakerphone. The 7130c also has excellent call quality and can deliver e-mail in real time. The bad: The SureType technology on the RIM BlackBerry 7130c takes some acclimation. The bottom line: The RIM BlackBerry 7130c is an excellent phone and e-mail device for consumers and professionals alike; plus, it's one of the best-designed BlackBerrys we've seen to date.
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