BlackBerry Tour

BlackBerry Tour

The BlackBerry Tour is a solid business smartphone with loads of messaging options. Further, while Verizon Wireless fans have been clamoring for a new BlackBerry with a keyboard as an alternative to the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm, we'd have trouble recommending the BlackBerry Tour over AT&T's BlackBerry Bold, which can run all the same apps, but which also uses Wi-Fi.

Design – Very Good

The new BlackBerry Tour on Verizon is an attractive, modern looking BlackBerry device, and for better or worse it hews to recent BlackBerry design trends. The BlackBerry Tour has a crisp and colorful screen.

Calling – Very Good

Though call quality on the BlackBerry Tour left us wanting, the phone had an excellent selection of calling features, including some that you can't find on other carriers. The phone lacked the bright clarity of the BlackBerry Bold. Battery life was also superb, as we'd expect from a BlackBerry device.


The BlackBerry Tour has a few nifty tricks up its sleeve for handling an address book. If you don't have access to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), you can synchronize your contacts and calendar manually with Outlook using the BlackBerry desktop application. Beyond these standard options, the BlackBerry Tour is the first BlackBerry device we've seen that can work with Facebook to grab friends' contact information from your FB account. If a person doesn't have a phone number listed on Facebook, the BlackBerry will send them a message asking for their number.


Otherwise, the BlackBerry Tour gets a nice selection of calling features, including Visual Voicemail. The BlackBerry Tour also gets a good voice-dialing app, and you can activate voice dialing with the dedicated button on the side of the phone.


Messaging – Very Good

For messaging, no device is more powerful and versatile than a BlackBerry phone, and the BlackBerry Tour even takes a smaller step beyond what we've seen before on RIM's devices. For social networking fans, RIM has gone farther than any other smartphone maker in creating portable apps for Facebook and MySpace users, and these apps work great on the BlackBerry Tour.


The keyboards on recent BlackBerry phones have plenty of fans, but we're not in that lot. The BlackBerry Tour keyboard also made strange choices for key placements.


Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good

For productivity tools, the BlackBerry Tour comes equipped with DataViz' Documents to Go Standard edition. Unfortunately, the Tour relies on Verizon Wireless' buggy and fallible VZ Access Manager software.


Multimedia – Very Good

For such a competent business device, the BlackBerry Tour also turned out to be a powerful multimedia player. The phone can synchronize music with your iTunes library using the BlackBerry Media Sync application on your desktop. The video player on the BlackBerry Tour was even better than the music player, thanks to the phones dazzling, high resolution screen.


Web browsing - Good

Web browsing is the biggest disappointment on the BlackBerry Tour, or on any current BlackBerry device, for that matter. Verizon Wireless is notoriously stingy about Wi-Fi capabilities on their BlackBerry devices, and though the BlackBerry Tour surfs the Internet on Verizon's fastest, EV-DO Rev. A network, it isn't able to connect to your WLAN.


Camera - Good

it's telling that the BlackBerry Tour is available without a camera for the same price. There were also few camera options and no real shooting features. We appreciate having the two-stage camera button on the side, which let us press halfway to focus then further to, snap the shot.


GPS Navigation – Very Good

For GPS navigation, the BlackBerry Tour uses Verizon Wireless' VZ Navigator software. VZ Navigator worked fairly well on the BlackBerry Tour. The BlackBerry Tour didn't come loaded with the most advanced version of VZ Navigator we've seen, and we missed the speech recognition input that we've seen on some of Verizon's advanced feature phones, like the LG enV Touch.