The Blackberry Tour is one of RIM’s latest devices and aims to bring much needed improvements to the popular Smartphone series. That said, it should be noted that this is not a Blackberry Curve replacement. Although they share similar dimensions and design cues, the Tour is a whole different story compared to its brother the venerable Curve 8300.

DESIGN:

If you take a look at the Curve and the Tour it’s clear to see they have an obvious resemblance, but at the same time, admire the differences between the two. The Blackberry Tour would remind you of what would happen if the Curve and Bold made love and out popped a baby phone. The device is sleek and slender measuring just 4.4 inches high by 2.4 inches wide and only 0.6 inches thick. Weight is a mere 4.58 ounces.

The screen is 2.6 inches with 480 x 360 pixels and over 65,000 colors. The phone features a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus and image stabilization, video capture, 2x digital zoom and geo tagging. Also included is a Bluetooth 2.0 chip which accepts hands free, stereo headset and Phone Book Access. A standard 3.5mm jack is also included. The different networks supported are CDMA 800/1900 with support for EVDO.  Rev A. a SIM card slot is also included so roaming is supported on the 850/900/1800 and 1900MHz GSM/GPRS and EDGE networks.

Full QWERTY keyboard and a 1400 mAHr removable battery that is rated at 5 hours of talk time and up to 14 hours of standby time are all included.

PERFORMANCE:

Blackberry’s have long been known for the stellar call quality, top of the line messaging support and more recently, great multimedia functionality, all of which have been bundled together in the Blackberry Tour.

The full QWERTY keyboard is beautiful and typing is a pleasure. The keyboard is more in line with that of the Blackberry Bold and keys are not too firm and not too soft. Plus, thanks to a special coating, slipping and sliding on the keys due to sweating fingers is not a problem.

The 3.2 megapixel camera is decent. While it didn’t take the best quality picture we’ve seen on a mobile device is was still comparable to most and colors were accurate. Video recording quality on the other hand was not the best. While not as bad as the Curve, there were still some pixilation and jitters.

Messaging is still the best. Being a Blackberry owner myself, I never knew how much I loved my email until I got one. The Tour brings all the messaging functionality the Blackberry is known for and thanks to Blackberry OS 5.0, support and integration is tighter then before.

Call quality was, as always, great. Voices sounded crisp and clear without a hint of any noise. Speaker phone was also good but still not hitting the mark that the Bold has set. While we’re at it, WiFi is nonexistent on this device thanks to Verizon. That said you will be stuck with either Sprint or Verizon’s high-speed 3G network when data is required.

Speaking of data, we did find that the JAVA based browser wasn’t comparable to that of the iPhone, Pre or Skyfire. While it is a great improvement from Blackberry OS 4.3 it still needs some work as pages don’t always render right and sometimes the CSS is screwed up.

During our battery drain tests we were able to pull a full 6 hours of continuous talk time out of the device.

CONCLUSION:

Out of all the Blackberry’s to come out in recent years, the Tour seems to be one of the best. No, it hasn’t reinvented the wheel, but rather RIM has wisely chosen to refine the features that define the Blackberry. Have they succeeded? Yes!