The 9720 is ‘Berry’s new device that looks like from a couple of years back with design cues taken from the old Curve and Bold series smartphones. As a way to keep its price down, BlackBerry generously uses plastic on the phone’s chassis. We won’t find premium characteristics of recent BB10 smartphone, but at £149.99, the 9720 isn’t exactly affordable either.
As expected the keyboard is quite comfortable to use with plenty of space between keys. The 2.8-inch HVGA display also offers touch capability and although decent, it may feel a bit too cramped after using devices with much larger display. The 806MHz Tavor MG1 single-core processor and 512MB of RAM offer decent performance level on the older BB 7.1 platform.
Opening apps and swiping across display should be sufficiently smooth. The 1450mAh battery should deliver up to 7 hours of continuous talk time and about 18 days of standby time. Camera-wise, the phone is equipped with 5Mp EDOF camera with 4x digital zoom and image stabilization.
Although the 9720 uses the dated operating system, it already carries over some elements of the newer BB10 OS. T-Mobile UK is offering the BlackBerry 9720 with Pay As You Go plan that includes free BBM, 100 minutes of talktime, 400 texts and 1GB of data.
