Blackberry, as most people will know, are renowned for their quality push email devices and the Curve 8300 is no exception.

As mentioned in the intro the 8300 retains one of the best features of the Blackberry Pearl, which was the Trackball that allows for 360 degree navigation around the menus.

It’s also joined by a QWERTY keypad that features well spaced keys which are responsive and easy to press. You still have to press an ALT key to switch between numbers and letters, but for the most part it’s intelligent enough to know that when you want to key in phone numbers it does not require the ALT press.

It also looks stylish with a slick black and silver finish and it only weighs 111g, plus measures 107 x 60 x 15.5m, making it an ideal portable email solution.

Again technical specification is lacking on the 8300, you have Quad-Band GSM/EDGE, but there is no GPS, Wi-fi or 3G support, but yet again the 8300 can cope quite well without it as emails are pushed pretty quickly to the device.

On the subject of GPS though it lacks a dedicated receiver you still get Blackberry maps installed, so when you pair up the 8300 with an external Bluetooth antenna you can get some directions to destinations.

The interface is similar to the Pearl but Blackberry have made it a bit more consumer friendly, as the Media software is now a lot more accessible for exploring your internal and external memory cards. It’s just a pity that its memory card (microSD) has to fit underneath the battery cover and as there is only 64MB of internal memory so an expansion card should be considered a vital purchase.

Before we move on we have to say that video and music performance was great, though the internal speakers were not a match for a pair of headphones (which support 3.5" headphones), it was still not bad for a device not considered multimedia friendly.

Interestingly it did seem to pair up to our A2DP wireless headphones but it could not sustain playback, as the music kept breaking up (though this could be down to interference). We nearly forgot you can also watch videos on full screen which takes advantage of the 320 x 240 2.4" display to good effect.

Other applications pre-installed consist of PIM style notes, calendar and tasks, you also get a web browser, Blackberry Messenger and the rather addictive Brick Breaker Game.

Of course the curve has Enterprise Server compatibility support for Exchange, Lotus Domino and Novell GroupWise. Meaning you can get emails, contacts, scheduling and calendar info pushed to your device. So instead of collecting your email by initiating a connection you are always connected and receive your emails in real time.

However we used the Internet Solution service for our tests, which allows you to configure up to 10 supported email accounts and is ideal for consumers to get your email pushed to your device.

We found that any emails we sent from our desktop PC to our Curve were received pretty quickly, it’s only when you have attachments that it takes a bit longer.

On the subject of attachments the benefit of the Blackberry devices comes into play, as even though you don’t have any Word, PDF or Excel viewers installed (Documents To Go will soon be available mind) you don’t need them, because when you receive an attachment its contents can still be viewed using its own API. It does not display all information for example Excel Graphs but is does give you a representation of the original document (PDF) and an edited version.

You also have Blackberry’s Desktop software which is pretty good and with it you can install applications, send media to your device (uses Roxio software), backup/restore your device and synchronisation files between your PC's address book, memo pad, calendar and tasks.

If you buy the device sim-free you will need to get your existing sim upgraded to except the Blackberry service and it will cost you extra per month (prices vary from £5 to about £17 depending on your sim provider). Upgrading was simple enough and we got our Orange sim updated pretty easily. But we recommend you get the device on-contract instead to make life easier and possibly cheaper.

Finally you do have a 2MP camera with built in-flash for taking images, which though is not up to the standard of the Nokia range it still takes some good images.

And Battery life was darn good from the claimed 4 hours, but this is as you would expect for a device that does not have much power hungry technology to hinder its performance.