The Blackberry Tour is a fairly decent offering in the Blackberry line of phones. I am a heavy iPhone user, so I was a bit worried about using this phone with the hardware keyboard and scroll wheel interface. Let me say that the keyboard was very difficult to use for me because the keys are very small and hard to press without making a lot of mistakes, and making a phone call without any contacts to choose from took some effort.
Let me go into more detail about why I didn’t have any contacts to choose from, it seems that Blackberry software isn’t compatible with the Mac (They did finally release version 1.0, but I didn’t get a chance to use it), which I exclusively use, and without purchasing any 3rd party software, I was out of luck, so dialing a number was very difficult while in the car and moving.
I do have to say that the blackberry software was snappy, and somewhat easy to use, however I do think that the home screen needs to be a little more organized, I couldn’t access unread sms messages off the home screen without going into the menu and then into the sms app, and it was not easy to move stuff around.
For the regular users of Blackberry’s, the tour is the obvious choice over the storm or the curve, and it’s got solid hardware, and the Blackberry software is getting better.
One thing I must mention is that I couldn’t tether or sync on the Mac, but it seems that Blackberry has come out with a beta version of their software, so if you are a Mac user, unless you absolutely have to have a Blackberry, I would think twice about getting one.
The trackball navigation was smooth when selecting apps, but I found myself always clicking on the wrong thing because I would slightly move the trackball and it would click on the wrong answer or app, even with the sensitivity down, it was too sluggish to do anything, so I had to leave it fairly high.
The browser was ok, and I didn’t have any issues on most websites, but I didn’t really like the trackball pointer navigation. The Blackberry messenger is a new version, and it worked better than all the previous versions, and it also allows you to send your location via built in GPS.
The only thing I find about the whole Blackberry experience that would turn me away is the Blackberry App World, it’s limited in the number of apps, and most apps I use on a daily basis on my iPhone, were not available or in a different form, they were extremely overpriced.
All in all, the BlackBerry Tour is the best BlackBerry on the market despite it’s few shortcomings. Verizon needs to stop crippling devices, and RIM needs to start putting WiFi in their devices. The screen was a tad small, and didn’t use most of the available real estate, but if you are a die hard BlackBerry user, then the Tour is the best choice.
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