I’ve been a Blackberry user for a few years. I was a loyal Treo user that needed to have a device that was more reliable and made by a company with a solid future. You can understand my excitement when I heard about the anouncement of the Blackberry Tour. I would have the opportunity to upgrade from my Blackberry 8830 and get all the new bells and whistles RIM had to offer.
Design
The Tour looks and feels very nice. If the Blackberry Bold and Blackberry Curve were married and had a kid, it would the Tour. It’s bit smaller than my 8830 and has a rubber coating on the sides w/ rubberized keys on the keyboard. One of the biggest reasons that I wanted the Tour is because of the full QWERTY keyboard. I enjoyed using the 8830’s keyboard and the Tour is similar with the keys close and angled. My wife has a Curve and I really don’t like the spacing of the keys on keyboard at all.
Call Quality
Users out there that have one of those other smart phones cry like little girls at a Jonas Brothers concert when there are updates or new software is released. They talk a lot about the features that they have and explain why they are so important while they also downplay features that aren’t included and act like they really don’t need them anyway.
Let’s be real here. We’re talking about Cellular Phones. The primary purpose of a cellular phone is to make and receive calls. To me, this is the most important feature. If I can’t make and receive phone calls when I want or need to, then the device (or carrier) is a piece of crap. I earn money each day by going to a job that I don’t even like. The things that I spend my hard earned money on had better work exactly as I expect them to without equivocation. </rant>
The Blackberry Tour is possibly the best phone that I have ever owned or used. The call quality is crystal clear via the handset as well as the speaker phone. I’m reading that people are getting about 6 hours of talk time out of a single charge even though it’s rated for 5 hours.
Display
The display is very vibrate and looks far better than my 8830. I didn’t mind the display on my 8830 but holding the two side by side I wondered how I could be satisfied with it at all.
Messaging
Messaging is very good. If you’ve ever seen or used a Blackberry in the past, you’ll know that this is one of its strong points.
The Blackberry Messenger (BBM) is still in tact and possibly the best chat client around. (It will be getting even better with BBM version 5.0 that has been “leaked” to the Internet.) Quick links to install GTalk, AIM, Yahoo, ICQ (people still use this?) and MSN are included on the device. My IM preference (second to BBM) is BeeJiveIM which is a $20 third party application that handles the most popular IM clients in one.
Applications
Social networking enthusiast will find quick install icons for Flickr, MySpace and Facebook included. Facebook 1.6 even integrates with the messaging inbox so you don’t always have to hunt down those messages by opening the application.
DataViz Documents to Go Standard is included so that Word, Excel and PowerPoint files can be viewed and edited. However, in order to create new documents you’ll have to upgrade to the Pro version.
Some of this stuff is crapware but is easy to remove or hide the icons.
Camera
It is so nice having a camera phone again. I used to take a lot of pictures with my regular camera and when it was inconvenient to take carry, I had the camera on my phone to suppliment. The Tour has a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus, image stabilization and a blinding bright flash. I’m not a photographer but I think the pics are good enough. You can also record video (as long as you have a sd card).
Media Player
The multimedia is pretty decent. You can sync music with iTunes via the Blackberry Media Sync application from your desktop. I think it’s easier to do a file copy of music directly to the sd card. I was extremely happy to finally have a standard 3.5mm headphone jack on my phone. Video playback does very well thanks to the high resolution screen and can player various formats.
Browsing Experience
The Blackberry is known to have a crappy browser. I never thought it was that bad. I also don’t expect much from it because it is a mobile device. When I want to look up something quickly or when I have some extra time to read The NY Times, it works well for me. I also tend to only view sites that have a mobile version. So, the Blackberry browsing doesn’t compare to the experience that I get on my iPod Touch.
Complaints
- It is a little slow changing screens. I read on a forum that this is normal and may improve over time once it gets broken in. (I think this is a bogus explanation, but we’ll see. If not, I hope it’ll be fixed soon in an OS update.)
- It takes literally 5 MINUTES to boot up. Don’t pull the battery or restart if you’re in a hurry and need to get access to something in the next minute. You’ll have a wait on your hands. After installing an application I accidentally chose “Reboot Now” when I wanted to do a couple other things before rebooting. I hope this also will be fixed in an upcoming version.
- Mico USB – Why did they change the USB type? Now I have to buy all new accessories. Not particularly happy about that.
- Theme -There is only one theme available w/ the Sprint version? What’s up with that?
- No Wifi. I never really cared that my 8830 didn’t have wifi. For me, wifi connection are less plentiful than they are for many of the people who complain about not having wifi on a device. As a security guy, there are few wifi connections that I would bother to connect to anyway out of paranoa. I’ve also carried an unlimited data plan since I had my Treo so I’ve never had a problem. Rumors are saying a new version of the Tour might be available next year to silence those who are unhappy about this.
Went to my first Ubuntu Global Jam today headed up by Richard Johnson (@nixternal).
. It helped me to stay up to date with my contacts, appointments, passwords, to-do lists and tons more.
