Blackberry Tour review

A while back, the good folks at Verizon sent us an HTC Ozone and a Blackberry Tour to play with.  Ced and I split these up and I drew Tour duty (get it?).

Note on my Blackberry cred:  I've been using RIM's devices since the 8703, which was your basic Blackberry form factor with a physical QWERTY keyboard.  We also use the Blackberry Enterprise Server here, which makes the device an extension of our corporate Exchange server.  'nuff said?  Moving on.

My current Blackberry is the Storm, which was RIM's first touchscreen device.  Initially I was rather fond of the concept but its implementation wore me out after a time.  The keys are hard for my fat thumbs to press, especially the ones around the edges of the keyboard.  It's darned near impossible for me to reliable hit the "P" key, making it extremely hard to type things like "post-gazette.com".  Other things like battery life and the portrait-landscape orientation switching weren't very good either.  In short, the only thing I really like about the Storm is the camera.

The Tour is the same physical size and shape as the Storm but comes with a physical keyboard on the bottom like past Blackberries.  It also comes with the trackball in the center which acts just like you would expect.  In most cases it just moves the focus highlight around the screen so that you can push in on it to activate something, but at other times (like in the web browser) you will get a mouse cursor.  This made navigation through the OS and applications a cinch.

I've always been fond of RIM's full QWERTY keyboards.  This one is excellent as well, and with it my typing is quicker and a lot more accurate.  No issues to report there.

The screen resolution on the Tour is amazing.  I wasn't sure how much smaller the pixels could get but this thing is like looking at my desktop monitor.  

A word about the speed.  After enduring the second-and-a-half long pauses between some applications on my Storm, this thing is a rocket.  The speed at which it moves from app to home screen is pretty remarkable.  I'm guessing the OS or the processor or both were tweaked.

One new feature in the OS that users will like is that you can receive your emails in the same format it was created in.  This preserves all the formatting if the email was in HTML originally, which helps to ensure things don't get lost in translation.  So now when my boss puts something in bold because she's mad at me, I'm not missing her point.

The rest of the device is what you would expect from RIM.  It's got a camera that is every bit as good as the Storm's and battery life that seems a bit better considering that it doesn't have that gigantic screen to drive anymore.  In short, this is my favorite Blackberry to date and it's just a shame that I have to send it back.