14 DAY TRIAL // Boost Mobile, a Sprint subsidiary, has recently announced that it “permanently” drops the Blackberry Curve 8530 price to $199.99, which is $50 cheaper.
Boost Mobile is known as a contract-free carrier, but customers purchasing the Blackberry Curve 8530 can choose to activate the Monthly Unlimited with Shrinkage option to use a $50 monthly plan that will shrink the longer they stay with the same carrier.
Prices start from $50 and can go for as low as $35 per month, available with all Monthly Unlimited plans.
Basically, for every 6 on-time payments, the monthly payment will shrink by $5 from $50 to $35 per month. New customers that buy the Curve 8530 will pay the minimum monthly fee after 18 months.
The $50/month plan offers customers unlimited nationwide talk, text, web, 411, IM & email with no contracts. Voicemail, long distance and call waiting are also included.
Blackberry Curve 8530 is one of the low-priced smartphones offered by RIM on the market. The device is powered by a 528 MHz processor and runs on the Blackberry 5.0 platform.
It comes with a 2.46-inch TFT display with 65K colors support and 320 x 240 pixels resolution. The smartphone is CDMA compatible and offers Rev. 0 (up to 153.2 Kbps) data speed transfers.
Other key features of the Curve 8530 include: QWERTY keyboard, touch-sensitive optical trackpad, dedicated music keys, 3.5 mm audio jack, 256 MB ROM, microSD card slot for memory expansion (up to 32GB), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP support and GPS with A-GPS support (BlackBerry maps).
The smartphone sports a sub-par 2-megapixel camera with geo-tagging and camcorder. It measures 109 x 60 x 13.9 mm and weighs 106g (battery included).
The Li-Ion 1150 mAh battery is rated by the manufacturer for 252 hours standby time or 4 hour and 30 minutes talk time.