Sprint goes head-to-head with The Network, releasing a similar BlackBerry Tour with dual-mode worldwide roaming. Check it out in our Sprint Tour review.
Review summary of the Sprint Tour:
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 The BlackBerry Tour on Sprint finally brings the updated BlackBerry OS to the Now Network, and the Sprint Tour is undoubtedly the best BlackBerry device the carrier has to offer. Unfortunately, as so many other smartphones pass RIM by, the Sprint Tour is less and less exciting with each day. The hardware looks and feels solid, for a BlackBerry, and it seems like RIM has stopped innovating in their phone designs. 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 great multimedia features for music playback and sync and one of the most competent video players we've used on a smartphone. The screen is also fantastic, perhaps the best we've seen on a business device in this form factor. 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 like the HTC Snap. 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. The Sprint Tour also lacks Wi-Fi, and it's one of the more sluggish BlackBerry phones we've used. For those reasons we find the BlackBerry Bold on AT&T or BlackBerry Curve 8900 on T-Mobile easier to recommend. Release: July 2009. Price: $200.
Pros: Sleek BlackBerry design with the best BlackBerry screen yet. Great selection of apps for social networking, instant messaging. Sports package for NFL, NASCAR and MLB fans.
Cons: Sluggish performance. Web browser falling farther behind the competition. No Wi-Fi option, though we know future Sprint smartphones will have Wi-Fi.
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Full Sprint Tour Review:
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Design – Very Good
The Sprint version of the BlackBerry Tour looks almost exactly like the RIM BlackBerry Tour on Verizon Wireless that we reviewed early in the summer. It's a nice size for a BlackBerry device, a mostly black, slim handheld with a mix of textures and finishes on the outside and a silver band ringing the front of the phone. That band is more shiny, more silver on the Sprint Tour than the "titanium" band on the Verizon Tour, but that's about the only cosmetic difference. The Tour is a nice looking BlackBerry, and though the new BlackBerry Curve 8520 has us hankering for an optical touchpad to replace the trackball on the Tour, it's still recognizably a BlackBerry device.
The BlackBerry Tour has a crisp and colorful screen. Otherwise, the interface is exactly the same as the Verizon Tour and other recent BlackBerry phones, 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 device from RIM on Sprint, 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. Still, among U.S. carriers, Sprint has the best lineup of smartphones with great interface designs, ranging from the Palm Pre to the upcoming Sprint version of the HTC Touch Pro2 and newly announced HTC Hero. Compared to these other phones, the BlackBerry interface looks more like a pager than a polished, business device.
The Sprint Tour seemed like a very sluggish device. We would roll the trackball a bit and wait a moment until the phone responded. In more complicated apps like the Web browser or the Pandora music player, this was a more pronounced problem. The Tour just doesn't seem able to keep up with the raft of new and complicated apps being offered by Sprint and the BlackBerry App World. We also wish that Sprint would pre-load more apps onto the phone. Besides the basic contacts and calendar apps, most applications were actually links to download the app, including all the Instant Messaging apps, the Sprint Music store and other Sprint software, and more. You only have to download once, but it makes setup something of a hassle.
Calling – Very Good
Though call quality on the BlackBerry Tour left us wanting, the phone had an excellent selection of calling features. Sound quality suffered from a general muddiness, with a slightly digitized sound on both ends of our calls. The phone lacked the bright clarity of the BlackBerry Bold on AT&T. Rception was solid, but not excellent, usually a bar or two short of full network signal 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 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. Takes Facebook stalking to a new, mobile height. The BlackBerry Tour doesn't go as far as the Palm Pre's Synergy feature, which automatically imports and merges all Facebook contacts with your corporate address book, and seems more in line with a similar feature on the Windows Mobile HTC Touch Pro2.
Otherwise, the BlackBerry Tour gets a nice selection of calling features. The Sprint version of the Tour lacks visual voicemail, which the Verizon Wireless version supports, and that might be enough to push buyers away from the Now Network and towards The Network. Even though Apple started the Visual Voicemail revolution with their iPhone on AT&T, Sprint has been known to offer the feature themselves, notably on the Samsung Instinct S30. 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 Sprint Tour even goes beyond what we've seen before on RIM's devices. The messaging apps still look horrible, another throwback from the old pager days, but they're highly functional. 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, Sprint offers a number of different clients available for download, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk and even ICQ. 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 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 Pro2. The Sprint 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 app on the Sprint 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 old VCR has a better looking interface.
For productivity tools, the BlackBerry Tour on Sprint 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.
Even though Sprint uses a data network that isn't widely available across the globe, the BlackBerry Tour features a dual-mode radio that lets travelers connect to 3G networks while traveling abroad. The Sprint Tour uses an HSPA modem on the 2100 band, found commonly throughout the world, but it's a band that isn't used for 3G in the U.S. So, when you're traveling you can use the Sprint Tour as an unlocked GSM phone and insert your own SIM card for local access.
Multimedia – Very Good
For such a competent business device, the Sprint 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 sideloaded with no trouble, and our album artwork came through looking good. The speaker on the phone was quiet for our tastes, but the Tour comes with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, a smart option for music on the go. We wish the Sprint Tour came with some internal memory to store tunes, but instead Sprint only bundles a palrty 1GB microSD card. The phone can handle much larger cards, up to 16GB, so you'll want to invest in a higher capacity if you listen on the go.
The video player on the Sprint Tour was even better than the music player, thanks to the phone's bright, colorful screen and surprisingly powerful video player. The Tour could play any video we loaded onto the memory card, even DVD-resolution videos that were sized way too large for the phone's 480 by 360 pixel screen. The video player resized our clips, 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 Sprint Tour.
Web browsing - Good
Web browsing is the biggest disappointment on the Sprint Tour, or on any current BlackBerry device, for that matter. Now that even Windows Mobile phones, like the HTC Snap, have a modern, updated Web browser, RIM's BlackBerry platform has fallen to the back of the line 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 that replace the need the Web interface. But we think the BlackBerry Web browser is long overdue for a serious update.
Sprint has been vocal about its plans to bring Wi-Fi to the BlackBerry platform, and all its smartphones, but the Sprint Tour doesn't include a WLAN option. 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. Even so, we were happy with the browsing speeds we saw on Sprint's EV-DO Rev. A network, which is the fastest network we've tested in the U.S.
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. 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. Images were certainly good enough for Facebook and social messaging tasks, but you won't be hanging these on a wall any time soon. Check out our image samples below.
Self Portrait Outdoors
Sunflowers, couldn't focus on foreground
Lounging with Cholmondeley
GPS Navigation – Very Good
The Sprint Tour uses Sprint Navigator for GPS navigation, and the phone did a nice job handling turn-by-turn directions. The Tour found us quickly for a first fix, and followed us smoothly on our trek in and out of the downtown Dallas area. Sprint Navigator even has spoken directions, so it will read off upcoming turns with their street names while you're driving, keeping your eyes on the road. We'd like to see TeleNav, the creators of the Sprint Navigator app, update their point of interest database a bit more frequently, as some of the spots to which it guided us were closed down or nonexistent when we got there, but for the most part the service maintains an extensive list of locations and travel destinations.
Which BlackBerry Tour to Buy?
So, what's the real difference between the Sprint version of the BlackBerry Tour and the Verizon Wireless version? Not much, but Sprint does bundle a few of their own exclusive Web services and apps on the phone. The Sprint Tour comes with Sprint's extensive sports and entertainment package. That includes the NASCAR Sprint Mobile app, the NFL Mobile Live app and the MLB.com Mobile Premium app, all of which are exclusive to Sprint's device. In addition, you can access Sprint TV for streaming video clips, though the quality of the streaming content is questionable, and probably not worth any extra cost. On the other hand, we found Sprint's Tour to be a bit more sluggish than the Verizon Wireless model when used side-by-side. Verizon's Tour also comes with Visual Voicemail, which is a great feature. For music fans, the Sprint Tour ships with Pandora pre-installed, while the Verizon Tour shows up with a Slacker Radio app pre-loaded. Need a final push? At press time, the Sprint Tour costs $200 with a contract agreement and $100 mail-in rebate, while the VZW model costs $50 less at $150, with no rebate required. Prices change frequently, but it seems to us a balancing act between the sports package on Sprint and the visual Voicemail on Verizon Wireless.
Price and availability
The Sprint version of the BlackBerry Tour is available now for $200 with a contract agreement and mail-in rebate.
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