Blackberry 9320 Vintage Mobile Phone

The Blackberry 9320 was one of the later mobile phones produced by RIM, later to become Blackberry in line with the name of its phones


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The Blackberry 9320 was one of their low end phones which was launched in May 2012 amidst a background of the company which was called RIM, at the time, losing its market share and looking at ways of regaining it.

The 9320 took the Blackberry back to its roots as it incorporated a simple QWERTY keyboard, a squat, chunky design, no touchscreen and the focus was on the use of BlackBerry Messenger as its unique selling point.


The 9320 was aimed to be a low cost phone and as such it did not offer all the capabilities of some of the other phones. The basic specification detailed a 2.4in display, 512MB of RAM and 512MB of storage space for apps. This was quite sufficient for most uers of the day.

The Blackberry 9320 came in four colours and is a relatively light phone to use - ideal for fitting into smaller pockets, etc.

The 2.4 inch display was relatively small and when compared to the other full screens being used by manufacturers like Samsung and Apple, it was definitely very small.

That said, users did say it was easy to use but the use of such a small screen meant that it was not possible to see nearly as much as was possible on competing full screen smartphones.

Another downside of the phone was that the keyboard was small and this made it difficult to use without hitting the wrong key on occasions.

The 9320 came with the Blackberry OS 7.1 installed. This was icon based and could be navigated using the optical trackpad.

In terms of the camera offered a 3.5 megapixels which could take reasonable images, but it was not nearly as good as other smartphones of the day.

However the camera did have a flash as well as a geo-tagging facility, and video could be recorded, although an SD card was needed for this as a result of the storage needed.


Blackberry 9320 Vintage Mobile Phone Specifications
 
Parameter Details
Technology 2G (GSM, GPRS, EDGE), 3G (UMTS)
Launch May 2012
Dimensions 60 x 109 x 12.7 mm
Weight 103g
CPU 806 MHz, 1 core
Memory cards microSD, microSDHC
Display 2.44 inch TFT, 320 x 240 pixels
Battery 1450 mAh, lithium ion
Camera 2048 x 1536 pixels with LED flash
SIM card Mini-SIM, 2FF (one SIM card position)
Wi-Fi 802.11b, g, n
USB USB2.0, micro-USB connector
Bluetooth 2.1
Positioning GPS & AGPS
Mobile Technologies GSM, GPRS (Class 10), EDGE, UMTS
Bands GSM: 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz
UMTS: 800, 850, 900, 1900, 2100 MHz
Loudspeaker Yes

Overall, the phone was not particularly well received as it was well behind the competition in terms of real capabilities. However the Blackberry 9320 was relatively low cost and was able to perform well in many ways, and of course it had the Blackberry messaging service.

At this stage, RIM, owner of the Blackberry series of phones was finding the marketplace very hard as it had lost the lead to other competitors and it was seeking to hold on to customers using the approach it had aways done, rather adapting in a more robust manner.

Ian Poole   Written by Ian Poole .
  Experienced electronics engineer and author.



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