BlackBerry Tour 9630 (Verizon) Cell Phone Review

Software & Functionality

The BlackBerry Tour is a 3G World Edition smart phone which gives you the option to make phone calls in 220 countries and to access email and the Internet in any of the 175 countries where Verizon Wireless provides data roaming services. The Tour comes with a nice col
lection of plug ends that can, as shown in Figure 10, be slid into the end of the charging cable. This will be very useful to world travelers. Calling in the US was pretty seamless with good connections and good audio.

Figure 10: Interchangeable plugs.

If you have used a BlackBerry in the past, you will be comfortable with the Tour as it keeps the same basic button layout and organization, and happily, you will find the new BlackBerry interface a slight improvement. However, the BlackBerry operating system is showing signs of age. While the iPhone, the Pre, and others have simplified and organized their operating systems, BlackBerry still has many confusing settings and menus that require successive clicks. Also, it seems that as functionality like the camera and multimedia player has been added, the screens that control menu choices for these may not follow the same menu patterns as other more basic functionality. So often a user might expect a certain choice to be available on a certain screen, but will find that it is not available.

Another place that the BlackBerry OS shows signs of age is in its web browser. Browsing on an iPhone, the Pre, or even a Windows Mobile device is a much more pleasing experience. If you have not seen browsing on one of these other phones, you might think that browsing on the BlackBerry is adequate. But once you have surfed the web from a better smart phone browser, you will be aggravated by the BlackBerry browser.

That said, the screen and icon placement on the Tour is very good. As shown in Figure 11, the main screen has six icons that include Messages, Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Browser, and Media.

Figure 11: The Tour main screen.

Pressing the Menu button at the main screen will take you to the Application screen, seen in Figure 12, where you will have many additional choices for controlling settings, media, the camera, SMS and MMS, games, and more.

Figure 12: The Tour menu screen.

From the Application Center you can also access additional applications including Flick3r, Facebook, MySpace, Google Talk, AOL AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and more, as shown in Figure 12.

Figure 13: The application center.

Because it was developed as a business operating system, the BlackBerry OS, performs well with a company BlackBerry Enterprise Server, but you can also sync your contacts and calendar manually with Outlook. With the Facebook app, you can also grab contact information on your Facebook friends.

Business functionality such as email is very good. There is support for POP, IMAP, and Microsoft Exchange. As expected the BlackBerry excels at messaging. We again found the interface a bit dated, but SMS conversations are threaded and IM advocates will find that the Tour supports many IM clients including AOL, GoogleTalk, AIM, and Yahoo.

The Tour has Visual Voicemail that lets you listen to messages in any order and delete any messages you like. There is also a good voice dialing application which is activated by a voice dialing button on the side of the phone. The speaker has a slightly muddy quality, but is loud enough for most circumstances.

Using the calendar on the Tour is not visually appealing, but it is very functional.

The BlackBerry Tour User Guide is available online at the BlackBerry website. Even if you have used a BlackBerry before, you will want to check it out. The shortcut guides are especially useful and they include shortcuts for typing, phoning, photography, creating attachments, browsing, searching, and other functionality.