Alright, a little review of the BlackBerry Tour 9630 seems to be in orders, since the early adopters have done their business and now the rest of the world is waiting to hear whether investing in the Tour 9630 will be worth it. This review covers the BlackBerry Tour launched by Verizon Wireless in the United States as well as that by Bell Mobility in Canada. The handsets are essentially the same, with minor differences which will be pointed out as and when they come up. So let’s get to it.
Screen:
The BlackBerry Tour 9630 features the usual beautiful 480×360 resolution LCD display. The screen is covered with a hard plastic covering which is better than the one found on the Bold, and is likely to protect the LCD from scratches to greater effectiveness. You get a screen of vibrant colors and a rich viewing experience. Point to note: this is now RIM’s standard screen for all future devices.
Voice Calling:
One word. Excellent. The Tour 9630 is just amazing, you can hear callers loud and clear and they could probably smell your lunch. But seriously. Also good news for Verizon users, the carrier is really putting its back into making sure you stay connected at all times, early users have reported with pure joy that they don’t experience dropped calls even in low signal areas. The Bell model is just as good.
Speaker/Speakerphone:
The Tour is after all a BlackBerry device and has essentially to cater to the business crowd, as such a solid speaker and speakerphone count. Big time. And in this department the Tour again scores big. There’s only one speaker located on the left side of the device, the right side is home to the 3.5mm headset jack. But this one speakerphone is loud and clear and plain awesome. A little surprising is the fact that even though the speakerphone could talk to a full stadium, the ringtones and audio in general play back at a lower tone through the speaker. Especially when you compare it to the Bold. That being said it’s probably best that your ringtone doesn’t blow everyone’s eardrums out.
OS:
And of course the OS; the Verizon Tour comes with OS 4.7.1 while Bell ships their Tour with OS 4.7.1.40. The Verizon OS is just like a non-touch Strom OS, just tweaked to work with a trackball and QWERTY. The OS is solid and very stable and apart from minor carrier related issues such as the Bell OS not catching any EV-DO signals, the handset is geared to be your new best friend.
Hardware:
The device is a sold manufacturing job. No wobbling, no messy buttons, you can easily type on your Tour while it rests on your desk. The volume and camera shutter buttons are nice and easy to work with. The four main navigation buttons, Send, Menu, Back, End, give great feedback while you move within the device and are decently sized. The handset could handle a fair bit of manhandling as well. But why would you want to hurt something so pretty? As for the QWERTY keyboard, it’s about 20 percent bigger than that of the Curve 8900 and much more solid than that of the Bold. You basically hit only one key at a time. Yay!
Overall Design and Battery Life:
We love the design; it’s as simple as that. Of course liking or not liking is your own personal decision, but damn that’s a good looking phone. The Tour is little bigger than the Storm but its comfortable to hold and that’s the point. The battery life is great, the 1400mAH battery packs in good performance even with all your nutty apps running. So email, text message, voice call, BlackBerry Messenger, Twitter your head off.
Hiccup:
The only problem we have with the Tour is that in this day and age, the handset does not have Wi-Fi support. If anything would have made this near perfect smartphone perfect, it would have been Wi-Fi. Oh well, just keep us connected Verizon and Bell, and we’ll forgive you.
Overall this is a great device, and you’ll be investing in pure quality with the Tour 9630.
Images courtesy of BGR
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