Very GoodThe new BlackBerry Tour 9630 is a remix of many of the best BlackBerry features on the market today packed into beautiful hardware. It's the benchmark for business smartphones, as well as being an excellent music player and a terrific tool for social networking. My unit was a little buggy, but the Tour is still the best smartphone on Verizon Wireless.
The Tour is beautiful. At 4.4 by 2.4 by .6 inches (HWD) and 4.6 ounces, it looks like a cross between the BlackBerry Bold and the Curve 8900, with the Bold's closer-set keys, but the 8900's softly rounded top. The 2.4-inch, 480-by-360 screen is so tight, you can't even see the pixels, and the back is a nice mix of soft-touch and textured plastic. The Tour has a 3.5mm headphone jack that works with ordinary music-player headphones, and a standard microUSB charging port.
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Although its RF reception is merely average, the Tour has the best receiving voice quality of any Verizon Wireless phone on the market today. Calls sound beautiful through the earpiece, and crystal-clear through mono or stereo Bluetooth headphones. The speakerphone's decent, too. Transmissions weren't quite as perfect, as some background noise came through.
The Tour is a true world phone, able to connect on Verizon's 3G network here in the U.S. and on 2G GSM/EDGE and 3G HSPA networks abroad. (There's no Wi-Fi.) It comes with a SIM card that charges high roaming rates but promises seamless calling with your U.S. number. If if you want to use a foreign SIM card and number at lower rates, you can call Verizon to unlock your phone's SIM slot after 60 days.
Voice dialing worked fine over a Bluetooth headset. The Tour comes with visual voicemail, and both ringtones and the vibrating alert were of average power. Talk time, at 6 hours and 32 minutes, was very good for a Verizon Wireless phone.
If you send messages, the Tour has you covered, whether they're e-mail, IM, SMS, MMS, or social networking updates. The Tour offers the usual excellent BlackBerry push e-mail, with a new setup screen that's easier to use than ever. Included DataViz software lets you view or edit Microsoft Office document attachments. The Facebook client now plumbs right into the BlackBerry's native contact book and calendar, even throwing Facebook status updates into your list of messages. The MySpace client is good-looking and relatively complete. The Tour comes with AIM, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google IM clients that support full desktop buddy lists, too.
The BlackBerry Web browser is still weak, stalling on many JavaScript-heavy pages. Your best bet is to install an alternative browser, either Opera Mini for pure speed or BOLT for desktop fidelity; both worked smoothly, though BOLT's default text size is very small on the high-res screen.
The Tour offers an unusually flexible set of music options. You can download songs directly onto the phone for $1.99 each through an on-device client, sync music over from a PC with Rhapsody, sync unprotected iTunes playlists using free software from RIM, or drag and drop your music. Music sounds great. Videos look sharp, too; the Tour plays the same MP4-format videos the BlackBerry Bold does, and has no problem playing movies from a memory card or streaming YouTube videos over Bluetooth headsets. You can store media in the 105 MB of free onboard memory, or on a microSD card. The Tour comes with a 2GB microSD card to store all your media, and it worked with my 16GB SanDisk Mobile Ultra card as well.
The 3.2-megapixel camera has autofocus, which is a mixed blessing; it made for sharp photos with terrific exposure and white balance, but stuck the Tour with an annoying 1.3-second shutter delay. Alas, there's no way to turn off the autofocus. The video camera mode takes smooth 480-by-352 videos at 24 frames per second. You can automatically geotag your photos, or upload them to Facebook, MySpace, AIM, or Flickr from the camera screen.
The Tour also comes with two mapping options (the free BlackBerry Maps, which offers GPS positioning but not spoken directions, and the $9.99 VZ Navigator, which adds spoken directions) and works as a modem for PCs and Macs. I got download speeds from 550 to 750 kbps with the Tour, which isn't great for an EV-DO Rev A modem, but will do in a pinch.
If you want more apps, you can download them from the 1,600-strong catalog in BlackBerry App World on the phone. Java performance tested with the JBenchmark benchmark suite was a bit slower than the BlackBerry Bold, except that the Tour successfully ran a gaming benchmark at which the Bold couldn't complete.
Sounds great, huh? Here's the warning: My Tour, using the same 4.7.1.40 software that Verizon says will be released to the public, was buggy. But it says something about the Tour's great bones and Verizon's weak smartphone lineup that I'm still recommending it. That said, you should buy this with your eyes open to its potential flaws.
I noticed two major bugs on my unit. First, the screen emits a subtle, very high pitched noise when it's on. Some people can't hear it at all, and you can't hear it when you're wearing a headset. But it can be annoying to people with very sensitive hearing.
The Tour also twice suddenly stopped being able to read its memory card. The first time, re-seating the card fixed the problem; the second time, I had to pull and re-seat the battery.
I'm confident that Verizon and RIM will fix these flaws, and the Tour is such a positive jump forward from the BlackBerry Curve 8330 that I'd say go for it. As the rest of Verizon's recent smartphone lineup consists of the BlackBerry Storm and a bunch of Windows Mobile phones, which have their own issues, the Tour is still the best choice of the bunch.
The Tour will be released July 12 on both Verizon and Sprint for $199.99 with a two year contract, after rebates.
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