BlackBerry Tour 9630 (Verizon) Cell Phone Review

Additional Functionality

The Tour has a built-in 3.2 megapixel camera with an LED flash and geo-tagging.  We found the flash a little weak, but in good lighting, the Tour took adequate photos. It did a better job than most camera phones at taking close-ups. The Tour can also take video. While adequate for most situations where you need a short video, the 15 frames per second video is not well-suited to fast moving video situations.

The BlackBerry Tour has an excellent video player. It played every video we tried. It even resized the videos that were too large. While watching long videos on the small 2.5” display may be a bit trying on the eyes, the sharpness and great colors of the screen make video watching a little easier.

Thanks to the support for a microSD card, the Tour can also be used as a media player. Music can be loaded directly on the card, transferred over the USB or Bluetooth connection or synchronized using the BlackBerry Desktop Manager. There is a Verizon V Cast Music Store. The tour is also compatible with Rhapsody. Although the included hard ear buds are uncomfortable and not terribly good, when you add a better set of ear buds, we found the audio quality to be very good.

The Verizon Tour can use the VerizonVZ Navigator software to allow for turn-by-turn navigation with the built-in GPS. This service is excellent, but carries an additional charge from Verizon.

Battery life of the Tour is good. Research in Motion asserts that the Tour has 5 hours of talk time and 14 days of standby. We had no trouble getting through the day on a charge, even when running applications in the background.

However, we must state that the Tour does not have WiFi. This actually gives the phone longer battery life, it is an omission that is hard to overlook. Wi-Fi access is a wonderful feature for smart phones and it has had universal appeal. Some BlackBerry shoppers will take a pass on the Tour just because of this lack of Wi-Fi functionality.