My husband (after much badgering) bought me the Blackberry Curve 8520 for Christmas, and I must say so far I love it! I think it is a very stylish and easy to use hand set, which looks a lot more expensive than it actually was. My phone cost £125 on the orange contract from the phones 4 u shop.

I wanted the Blackberry curve because when I researched all of the smart phones on the market I decided it was by far the best value. When texting I find the full qwerty key pad very quick and easy to use and I can fire off text messages much quicker than I could on my old phone, however when my husband has tried to use it he found it very difficult and slow because of the small size of the keys.

Each Blackberry phone comes with a blackberry pin number, which you can use to send pin messages to other people with blackberry handsets for free, it works like an instant messaging service, which if you have a lot of friends with Blackberry's can be a very good feature.

I can send and receive e-mails via my phone which is a very useful feature and my Blackberry alerts me to a new message by a flashing red light in the top right hand corner, the same as with text messages.
You can also surf the net on the go which is my main reason for buying the phone, and there is an app store which is similar to the I phone app store but in my opinion there is less choice and the apps are more expensive. However there are still all the social networking apps which are great if you love your face book or twitter (which I do).

The camera is only a 2mp so not the best but it is easy to use and does it's job well enough. When using the voice dialling system it worked very well, I have had this feature on a lot of phones I have owned but this is the only one where it has worked properly.

I find when using the handset to make and receive calls it is very easy to use and the sound quality is very good. The battery life is not the best I find I have to charge it most days, however due to all of the extra features I spend a lot of time on my phone on face book or checking my e-mails so I can't really complain.

Overall I think this is by far the best phone I have ever owned, it is easy to use and works really well, I think for £125 you get a lot of phone for your money.

This review is also on Ciao.