A short Tour of the newest Blackberry
Research in Motion has announced a new member of the 3G BlackBerry smartphone family, the Tour (AKA the 9630).
This phone was designed for to replace older CDMA handsets including that large, clunky, long-in-the-tooth, model 8830 “World Edition” smartphone that Verizon has been selling for awhile.
The most important feature of the Tour is that it lets you communicate on 3G, EV-DO Rev. A networks here in North America, as well as 3G UMTS/HSPA (2100 Mhz) and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks overseas.
The new “candy bar style” handset also sports:
A full QWERTY keyboard
A full HTML Web browser
480 x 360 display
Removable/rechargeable 1400 mAh battery (5 hours talk time/14 days standby)
3.2 MP camera with flash, variable zoom, image stabilization, autofocus, and video recording
256MB Flash memory
Hot swappable microSD/SDHC memory card slot (16 GB now, 32 GB soon)
GPS (geotagging support, BlackBerry Maps and other location based apps/services)
Voice activated dialing
Enhanced background noise cancellation
Low-distortion (that’s their description, not mine) speakerphone
Bluetooth (2.0) support
And, of course the phone comes standard with RIM’s BlackBerry messaging services and the company’s new BlackBerry App World.
As for availability, the RIM press release states that “the BlackBerry Tour smartphone is expected to be available this summer from carriers in North America.” In this country that means expect a version for Verizon and another for Sprint.
One last point, despite the onslaught of iPhones, Android phones, Palm Pre phones, Symbian phones, Windows Mobile phones, and all the others, a whole lot of people still buy and use BlackBerrys.
RIM President and Co-CEO Mike Lazaridis reminds us: “BlackBerry continues to be the top selling smartphone brand in North America,” and adds “we are proud to add this powerful new 3G world phone to our successful product portfolio.”