The BlackBerry Tour is a “world phone” from Verizon Wireless, giving users the ability to make voice calls in over 220 countries and get email and Internet in 175 countries. That’s a lot of places to visit.
BlackBerry Tour features
Physically, the BlackBerry Tour looks a lot like the BlackBerry Curve. Under the metaphorical hood, though, there are some changes. The Tour is a little smaller in all dimensions and a little lighter. The Curve supports more audio formats than the Tour, like WAV and MIDI. The Tour boasts better battery life, up to 356 hours of standby and 5.5 hours of talk time. The Tour does not have Wi-Fi capability, but does boast far more networks it’s capable of talking to. Here’s the full list of networks the BlackBerry Tour supports:
Dual-band 800/1900 MHz CDMA2000 1X Ev-DO
2100 MHz UMTS networks
North America: 850 MHz GSM/GPRS
North America: 1900MHz GSM®/GPRS
Europe/Asia Pacific: 1800MHz GSM/GPRS
Europe/Asia Pacific: 900MHz GSM/GPRS
EDGE networks
UMTS/HSPA networks: 2100 MHz
The Tour also has many features that BlackBerry users are familiar with, like the continually impressive and improving email and messaging application, supporting integration with everything from Gmail to Microsoft Exchange. It also has the ability to tether the phone to give your PC Internet access, has an integrated GPS, and comes with a 2GB memory card.
Those features alone are pretty nice. But there are more that caught my eye: the BlackBerry Tour does come with a 2GB memory card, but that card can be expanded up to 16GB: phone storage is growing ever more impressive. The phone’s built-in camera is a solid 3.2 MP – equal to or better than most camera phones out there. Combined with the GPS, the camera also supports geotagging your photos.
Adding to the travel functionality, the Tour also comes with a large handful of various adapters and plugs, allowing you to charge the phone with different voltages and plug types around the world.
There’s the speakerphone: this phone can get LOUD. I put the volume on max and played a song. I placed the Tour next to my laptop, which was doing the same thing. It may be a subjective test, but I really couldn’t tell which one was louder. That’s a great bonus when you need to crank up the music.
For security-conscious applications, a BlackBerry Tour with no camera will also be available.
The Tour also being a Verizon phone, you get access to many of the Verizon applications, including VZ Navigator, V CAST, Rhapsody and V CAST Song ID. There are also the usual modules available for FaceBook, MySpace, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and other messaging applications.
BlackBerry Tour review conclusion
Visually, the phone doesn’t stand out from the others in the BlackBerry lineup. Functionality-wise, it stands out a little bit, with improvements over previous models in size, camera, GPS, the software additions from Verizon, and of course world-wide usage. And today, this is great, because BlackBerries don’t need massive changes. They’re already excellent phones, and this is no exception: the BlackBerry Tour is yet another solid, well-performing, reliable success in the BlackBerry lineup.
The BlackBerry Tour is available from Verizon Wireless for $200 after a $70 mail-in rebate with a new two-year customer agreement.