We check out RIM's newest full-QWERTY BlackBerry on Verizon Wireless. Is this the best smartphone around? Find out in our BlackBerry Tour review.
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Tour:
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 The BlackBerry Tour is a solid business smartphone with loads of messaging options. Thanks to diligent work by RIM building some very useful apps to connect to the major social networking and instant messaging services, the BlackBerry Tour isn't too buttoned up for business, and it makes a solid all-around choice. In fact, the phone has solid multimedia features with good music hardware and one of the best video players we've used on a smartphone. The screen is also fantastic, perhaps the best we've seen on a business device like this. Still, more and more the BlackBerry platform is showing its age. The Web browser is nearly useless compared to the desktop quality browsers you'll find on other advanced smartphones, even on new Windows Mobile devices. The calendar and messaging apps, while powerful enough, were downright ugly to use, and the phone still relies heavily on long, confusing, textual menus for settings and advanced features. Further, while Verizon Wireless fans have been clamoring for a new BlackBerry with a keyboard as an alternative to the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm, we'd have trouble recommending the BlackBerry Tour over AT&T's BlackBerry Bold, which can run all the same apps, but which also uses Wi-Fi. RIM has definitely polished the BlackBerry design to a glossy sheen, but there are better smartphones out there. Release: July 2009. Price: $200.
Pros: Sleek BlackBerry design with the best BlackBerry screen yet. Great selection of apps for social networking, instant messaging. Visual voicemail.
Cons: Call quality wasn't as good as other BlackBerry devices, like the BlackBerry Bold. Web browser falling farther behind the competition. We didn’t love the keyboard.
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Full RIM BlackBerry Tour Review:
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Design – Very Good
The new BlackBerry Tour on Verizon is an attractive, modern looking BlackBerry device, and for better or worse it hews to recent BlackBerry design trends. Of all the best full-QWERTY, non-touchscreen phones we've seen recently (to check them out, click here) the BlackBerry Tour finishes near the bottom in looks, and it wasn't nearly as thin, stylish and downright enviable as the Nokia E71x on AT&T. RIM has gotten into a strange habit recently of mixing up textures on their phones, with spots that are glossy, soft touch, textured or even banded with chrome. It's a nicer looking phone that the BlackBerry Bold, but it seems like RIM has stopped innovating in their designs.
The BlackBerry Tour has a crisp and colorful screen. Otherwise, the interface is almost completely unchanged, which is both good and bad for users. If you're looking to upgrade from a previous BlackBerry and you've been waiting for a new full-QWERTY device on Verizon Wireless, we've got good news. The new BlackBerry interface is a dramatic improvement over the last generation. It's more colorful and modern looking, but it keeps the same basic organization and button layout.
If you've been hesitant about the BlackBerry platform because it seems a bit too complicated for you, well, we've got some bad news as well. The BlackBerry OS, on its surface, is very pretty, its main menu flush with useful icons and folders. But at heart, this BlackBerry still seems like a pager, created more for corporate IT types than average users. Many applications come set up lacking key functions, requiring you to dig through long, confusing menus and settings options, and these were not only counterintuitive, but they were also constantly changing depending on where we were. None of it made much sense. For instance, you can adjust the phone's equalizer settings for music playback from a pop-up menu in the main music screen, but the same option disappears when you're on the Now Playing screen. This wasn't just a problem in the multimedia apps, similar issues cropped up everwhere. We appreciate the power and adaptability of the BlackBerry platform, but RIM should consider creating a no-fear option that would hide the extensive and disorganized options for those of us who just want a phone that works well, without so much hassle.
Calling – Very Good
Though call quality on the BlackBerry Tour left us wanting, the phone had an excellent selection of calling features, including some that you can't find on other carriers. Sound quality suffered from a general muddiness, with a deep humming sound attached to voices. The phone lacked the bright clarity of the BlackBerry Bold. Rception was usually excellent, a solid 5 bars of service on Verizon Wireless' network in the Dallas metro area. Battery life was also superb, as we'd expect from a BlackBerry device. Though RIM estimates only 5 hours of talk time, we managed a single call that lasted more than 6.5 hours. Older BlackBerry devices could go even longer, but in this age of hi-res screens and faster, 3G networks, we're happy with those numbers.
The BlackBerry Tour has a few nifty tricks up its sleeve for handling an address book. First, if your company uses a BlackBerry server, you can synchronize with your corporate accounts. If you don't have access to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), you can synchronize your contacts and calendar manucally with Outlook using the BlackBerry desktop application. Beyond these standard options, the BlackBerry Tour is the first BlackBerry device we've seen that can work with Facebook to grab friends' contact information from your FB account. Once you've set up the RIM Facebook App, you can import a contact's picture and available data. If a person doesn't have a phone number listed on Facebook, the BlackBerry will send them a message asking for their number. Kind of clever and creepy, all at once. The BlackBerry Tour doesn't go as far as the Palm Pre's Synergy feature, which automatically imports all Facebook contacts, and seems more in line with a similar feature on the Windows Mobile HTC Touch Pro 2.
Otherwise, the BlackBerry Tour gets a nice selection of calling features, including Visual Voicemail. Even though Apple started the Visual Voicemail revolution with their iPhone on AT&T, Verizon Wireless has done a great job equipping their devices with this excellent feature. Visual Voicemail lets you listen to messages out of order and delete the ones you don't need. Messages are saved on the phone, so you can listen without dialing into the central service. The BlackBerry Tour also gets a good voice dialing app, and you can activate voice dialing with the dedicated button on the side of the phone. The speakerphone was a bit disappointing; we wish it were much louder, as we had a hard time hearing callers when we tested it while driving around.
Messaging – Very Good
For messaging, no device is more powerful and versatile than a BlackBerry phone, and the BlackBerry Tour even takes a smaller step beyond what we've seen before on RIM's devices. The messaging apps still look horrible, another throwback from the old pager days. Text messaging comes in a threaded style, so you can track a full SMS conversation just as you would an IM chat. For instant messaging fans, Verizon Wireless offers a number of different clients available for download, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo and even Gmail. For social networking fans, RIM has gone farther than any other smartphone maker in creating portable apps for Facebook and MySpace users, and these apps work great on the BlackBerry Tour. In fact, Facebook has become so tightly integrated on the Tour that new messages sent to your Facebook account will actually show up in the BlackBerry's unified Messaging Inbox, along with regular e-mail, text messages and all the other incoming texts that BlackBerry collects into one convenient space.
The keyboards on recent BlackBerry phones have plenty of fans, but we're not in that lot. While plenty of folks we know swear by the angled keys and swooping, arched layout, we found the QWERTY keyboard to be too bunched together, with too little space between each letter. This is definitely a try-before-you-buy situation, but we prefer a wider, more generous keyboard, like the one we found on the HTC Touch Pro 2. The BlackBerry Tour keyboard also made strange choices for key placements. Most Internet users type the period key and @ key extensively, so we like when they get their own, unmodified key. But on the Tour, both of these require an Alt- key, while the $ gets its own key. There are two shift keys for Capital letters, but the period shares space with the "M' key. We'd like to see a more convenient layout for e-mails and Web browsing.
Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good
The calendar and scheduling app on the BlackBerry Tour is powerful and clever, but it's also about as ugly as apps come on a mobile device. We like being able to invite attendees to an event, and the Tour even includes some unique fields for event listings, like a Conference Call field that keeps track of dial-in numbers and access codes. It's too bad the calendar looks so ugly, a basic wireframe box with little visual input. Our microwave oven has a prettier interface.
For productivity tools, the BlackBerry Tour comes equipped with DataViz' Documents to Go Standard edition. You can open and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, but if you want to create a new document from scratch, you'll have to pony up for the full professional license. The Standard version also lacks some advanced features, but unless you're doing serious document work on the road, it will probably suit your needs for simple viewing and edits on the go.
The BlackBerry Tour can be used as a tethered modem for Internet access from a laptop on the road. Unfortunately, the Tour relies on Verizon Wireless' buggy and fallible VZ Access Manager software. We have hardly tested a phone with VZ Access Manager that didn't require a re-installation of the software and numerous restarts to keep the app working properly, and the BlackBerry Tour was no exception. Once you get the software to work properly, you'll be set for Web browsing at reasonably fast speeds over Verizon Wireless' faster EV-DO Rev. A network. But the software is so unreliable that we'd go with an option that doesn't require a software gateway, like the excellent MiFi 2200 we reviewed recently.
Multimedia – Very Good
For such a competent business device, the BlackBerry Tour also turned out to be a powerful multimedia player. The phone can synchronize music with your iTunes library using the BlackBerry Media Sync application on your desktop. In our tests, the Tour handled all the music we threw at it with no trouble, and our album artwork came through looking good. The speaker on the phone was a piddly little thing, but the Tour comes with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, a smart option for music on the go. In fact, Verizon Wireless has been uncharacteristically generous with their included accessories, so the BlackBerry Tour comes with a pre-loaded, 2GB microSD card and a pair of stereo headphones with a microphone for taking calls.
The video player on the BlackBerry Tour was even better than the music player, thanks to the phones dazzling, high resolution screen. The Tour could play any video we sideloaded onto the memory card, even videos that were sized way too large for the phone's 480 by 360 pixel screen. The video player resized our clips and played them full screen and they looked fantastic, especially sharp and colorful on the Tour's display. We wish the screen was large enough for long term viewing, but if you don't mind the smallish 2.5-inch display, you'll certainly enjoy watching movies on the BlackBerry Tour.
Web browsing - Good
Web browsing is the biggest disappointment on the BlackBerry Tour, or on any current BlackBerry device, for that matter. Now that even Windows Mobile phones, like the HTC Ozone, have a modern, updated Web browser, RIM's BlackBerry platform has fallen to the back of the pack among smartphones when it comes to Web browsing. The simple BlackBerry Browser can load full HTML Web pages, but layout was very messy, as images would overlap text and columns were a jumble of confused frames. The BlackBerry platform relies more on apps for popular Web services these days, and there are great, discrete options for Facebook, MySpace and Twitter clients so that you won't need the Web interface. But we think the BlackBerry Web browser is long overdue for a serious update.
Verizon Wireless is notoriously stingy about Wi-Fi capabilities on their BlackBerry devices, and though the BlackBerry Tour surfs the Internet on Verizon's fastest, EV-DO Rev. A network, it isn't able to connect to your WLAN. Even with the disappointing browser, we still missed the Wi-Fi connectivity. The BlackBerry Curve 8900 on T-Mobile is not only capable of Wi-Fi browsing, but it also uses Wi-Fi for phone calls, so that phone, which is stylistically quite similar to the Tour, might be a better option for serious Web surfers.
Camera - Good
The 3.2-megapixel camera on the BlackBerry Tour takes some nice shots for a cameraphone, but the camera features seem like they were tacked on at the last minute. It's telling that the BlackBerry Tour is available without a camera for the same price. The Tour does have auto focus, but the AF area was so large that it wouldn't focus on objects in the foreground and usually aimed for the larger background. There were also few camera options and no real shooting features. We appreciate having the two-stage camera button on the side, which let us press halfway to focus then further to snap the shot. But the camera was also sluggish and less responsive than any other app on the phone. Check out our image samples below.
Sunflowers and Risk
Sunflower
Self Portrait indoors
Self Portrait outdoors
Yellow Light Cycle
Cholmondeley close up
Couldn't Focus
GPS Navigation – Very Good
For GPS navigation, the BlackBerry Tour uses Verizon Wireless' VZ Navigator software. VZ Navigator worked fairly well on the BlackBerry Tour. It didn't take long to find us for its first GPS fix, and the software kept accurate track of us as we traveled in and out of the downtown Dallas area. The BlackBerry Tour didn't come loaded with the most advanced version of VZ Navigator we've seen, and we missed the speech recognition input that we've seen on some of Verizon's advanced feature phones, like the LG enV Touch. We were also happy to find that the phone can geo-tag photos in the camera.
Price and availability
The RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 is available now from Verizon Wireless for $200 with a contract agreement.
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