Long awaited, the RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 has at long last arrived in town, and it’s putting on somewhat a show. As the replacement to the RIM BlackBerry 8830 World Edition, the Tour offers 3G world roaming capabilities and brings a number of improvements in all three departments of design, features, and functioning. While we’re upset by the lack of Wi-Fi and other minor annoyances, the pros far prevail over the cons. It’s one of the strongest smartphone offerings from Verizon, and its business clients will be well-served by this piece of equipment. The RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 will be obtainable from the carrier starting October 23, for $199.99 with a two-year agreement and after a $70 mail-in rebate.

Design
The RIM BlackBerry Tour looks like the lovechild of the RIM BlackBerry Curve 8900 and the RIM BlackBerry Bold, inheriting various of the most excellent traits of the two smartphones. In terms of dimension, the Tour is more comparable to the Curve 8900, though somewhat larger and heavier at 4.4 inches tall by 2.4 inches wide by 0.6 inch thick and 4.5 ounces. (The Curve comes in at 4.2 inches tall by 2.3 inches wide by 0.5 inch thick and weighs 3.8 ounces.) In spite of everything, the device is much more pocketable than the Bold also the BlackBerry 8830. Plus, the extra weight gives the mobile phone a satisfyingly pure feel, and the flipside of the cell phone also features a partial soft-touch appearance for extra sturdiness.

The BlackBerry Tour’s design is a nice grouping of the BlackBerry Curve 8900 (pictured here) and the BlackBerry Bold.

The Tour features the identical display as the Curve 8900. It measures 2.4-inches diagonally and shows 65,536 colors at a 480×360-pixel resolution. Images and wording seem to be crisp and alive, and and colors explode off the screen.

Reminiscent of the Curve and Bold, the Tour features an updated client interface that’s fairly clear-cut and simple to steer. Quite a lot of of the menu icons come across akin, so they can be hard to distinguish at a glance, but overall the user interface is exceedingly clear-cut and simple to navigate. You can reshuffle the icons and organize them in folders, and as at all times, you can modify the home screen with backdrop imagery and themes.

Under the display, you’ll uncover the Talk and End keys, a menu shortcut, a back key, and a trackball navigator. Pressing the Alt and menu key will bring up an application switcher where you can toggle between tasks, but we found it more suitable to assign the switcher to one of the convenience keys to be found on the left and right sides of the mobile phone. To program these buttons, simply go to Options > Screen/Keyboard and scroll down to the left and right convenience fields to designate an app or task to the controls.

The BlackBerry Tour’s QWERTY keyboard is somewhat easy to manage.

For text entry, the Tour offers a 35-key QWERTY keyboard that is reminiscent of the one found on the Bold, which is a good thing. Clearly with the Tour’s more compact frame, the keyboard isn’t absolutely as spacious as the Bold’s but still features good-size buttons. To inhibit them from feeling too even, the rectangular keys have a small ridge and a white backlight makes the letters and numbers (highlighted in red) painless to see in darker environments. We were quite happy using the Tour’s keyboard. Plus, the keyboard just had a more high-quality feel compared with the Curve’s where the buttons felt a little plasticky. Our only slight grumble is that the outside keys are a little tough to press, while the downward rise of the buttons make them a tad flat against the edge of the phone.

Other features of the BlackBerry 9630 Tour’s design consist of lock and mute buttons on top of the piece of equipment. In addition to the aforementioned convenience key, there’s a volume rocker, a 3.5mm headset jack, and a Micro-USB port on the right. Finally, the camera and flash are located on back, while behind the battery cover, you’ll find the SIM card and microSD expansion slots.

Verizon packages the RIM Blackberry 9630 with a load of accessories, with a travel charger, three global adapters, a USB cable, a stereo headphones, a 2GB microSD card, a SIM card, a swivel holster, a Global Support Kit, a software Compact disk, and reference information. For more add-ons, please check our cell phone accessories, ringtones, and help page.

Features
As the stand-in to the RIM BlackBerry 8830 World Edition, the RIM BlackBerry Tour offers dual-mode functionality (supporting dual-band CDMA and quad-band GSM networks) used for world roaming capabilities and ships with a SIM card. With this capability, the phone switches automatically between CDMA and GSM networks to offer seamless international roaming–all while keeping the same cellular phone number. In addition to voice coverage, the BlackBerry Tour supports the 2100MHz UMTS/HSDPA band, so you can find 3G support overseas, while working on Verizon’s EV-DO Rev. A network nationally. In all, you’ll obtain voice coverage in 220 countries and data coverage (e-mail and Internet) in 175 countries. Be positive to check the international roaming rates for voice calls and text messages before you head off on your excursion: Verizon’s rates can get pretty expensive in some areas, ranging from 69 cents up to $4.99 per minute. You can locate the carrier’s international plans here.

The RIM BlackBerry Tour offers world roaming capabilities and ships with a SIM card.

Other cell phone features include a speakerphone, voice-activated dialing, smart dialing, conference calling, speed dial, and text and multimedia messaging. The Tour also supports Visual Voice Mail, but be aware that this service costs an additional $2.99 per month. The mobile phone book is only limited by the available memory with room in all entry for multiple numbers, e-mail addresses, work and home address, job title, and more. For caller ID purposes, you can attach a contact photo, group ID, or a custom ringtone.

While offering 3G support, the BlackBerry Tour does not have integrated Wi-Fi, but this isn’t a case of Verizon crippling the feature; Sprint’s version of the Tour also lacks Wi-Fi. You do get Bluetooth 2.0 with support for wireless headsets, stereo Bluetooth (A2DP/AVCRP), hands-free kits, phone book access, serial port, and dial-up networking. The latter allows you to use the Tour as a wireless modem for your laptop, but to use the feature, you will require to sign up for Verizon’s Mobile Broadband Connect plan, which ranges from $39.99 per month for 250MB of data up to $59.99 for 5GB of data.

GPS is also onboard. The smartphone uses both satellites and cellular triangulation to find your position and can provide navigation via numerous methods. The smartphone ships with BlackBerry Maps, where you can get maps, text-based turn-by-turn instructions, and seek for local businesses. Then again, for real-time voice-guided directions, you will need to subscribe to a location-based service, which Verizon provides through VZ Navigator. The service costs $9.99 a month; unfortunately, our review unit was not set up with the service to test it out.

Of course, what would a BlackBerry be without e-mail? The BlackBerry Tour can sync with your company’s BlackBerry Enterprise server, with support for Microsoft Exchange, IBM Lotus Domino, or Novell GroupWise, to transfer corporate e-mail in real time. With BlackBerry Internet Service, you can also log on up to 10 personal/business POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts. There’s also an attachment viewer for opening Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Corel WordPerfect, PDF, JPEG, GIF, and more. Thankfully, there’s more instant messaging support as well, so in addition to BlackBerry Messenger, there are also preloaded clients IM for Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, and AIM.

To supplement the attachment viewer, the smartphone ships with DataViz Documents To Go Standard Edition, so you can now edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files as well. If you want the capacity to create new documents, you will have to upgrade to the Premium Edition, however. Staple personal information management tools, like a Calendar, a task list, a memo pad, a voice recorder, a calculator, will also help keep you on track. Recognizing the growing popularity of public networking sites, Verizon and RIM has also included Facebook, MySpace, and Flickr on the BlackBerry Tour for easy access.

In addition to the preloaded apps, the BlackBerry Tour supports the in recent times launched BlackBerry App World. The catalog has a primitive, but easy-to-use, interface and features a fairly comprehensive database of applications, which you can view by category, top downloads, or featured items. You can also explore by title. We downloaded numerous programs over Verizon’s 3G network, including Slacker Radio, the Weather Channel, and AP News, and had no problems. The terrible news, however, is that like the T-Mobile G1, you can’t save apps to the microSD card, so you’ll have to download them to the phone’s main memory, which isn’t that much at 256MB.

Despite the fact that the app store has plenty of entertainment apps, there are some onboard options as well. The BlackBerry Tour features a built-in media player that can play an assortment of music and video formats, as well as MP3, WMA, WMA ProPlus Bluetooth, AAC, AAC+, and eAAC+ files, and MPEG4, WMV, and H.264 video clips. There’s a search function, playlist creation, shuffle and repeat, and you get a full-screen mode for video playback. You can purchase and download songs over the air through V Cast Music or stream music from various sites. The included software CD also contains a copy of Roxio Easy Media Creator, so you can create MP3s from CDs and add audio tags. Make good use of that 2GB microSD card and save all your multimedia files on there. If you need extra, the expansion slot can allow up to 16GB cards. Video and TV buffs might be upset to learn that the Verizon BlackBerry Tour will not support V Cast Mobile TV, whereas Sprint’s version of the Tour will support the carrier’s mobile TV service.

Picture quality was second-rate, and there’s a bit of shutter lag.

The BlackBerry Tour comes with a 3.2-megapixel camera with 2x zoom, auto focus, flash, and image stabilization. It can also record video and geotag photos using the phone’s GPS. Despite the image stabilization, we found image quality to be a little shadowy. There’s a bit of shutter lag so it may be that we pulled the camera away too soon, but that in and of itself is annoying. Video quality was in reality more impressive. The picture had some expected pixelation but was more often than not clear and it did well even in darker environments. For enterprise customers whose office bans camera phones, Verizon will also offer a version without a camera.

Performance

We tested the dual-mode (CDMA 800/1900; GSM 850/900/1800/1900; UMTS/HSDPA 2100) RIM BlackBerry Tour 9630 in San Francisco with Verizon Wireless service and telephone call quality was fine. We heard our callers loud and clear; in fact, it was practically too loud so we had to take the volume down a couple of notches. There are also settings to improve the audio by boosting the treble or bass, but we didn’t feel the need to so. Our callers also had positive comments and said calls sounded quite clear. However, they could tell when we switched to the speakerphone without warning. While the audio was not quite as pristine, we were still able to carry on with the conversation. On our side, the calls had enough volume but sounded just a bit hollow.

We paired the smartphone with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headphones and the Motorola S9 Bluetooth Active headset.

Equipped with a 528MHz Qualcomm processor, the BlackBerry Tour was able to keep up with our day-to-day demands and was quite a fast small device. We encountered minimal delays, and we were able to switch between tasks with no problems. Verizon’s EV-DO Rev. A network also provided quick as well as reliable coverage here in San Francisco. App and music downloads were pretty swift. It took 52 seconds to download the Slacker app, while a 1.94MB song took 1 minute and 27 seconds from V Cast Music. Thanks to the inclusion of a 3.5mm headphone jack, we were able to plug in our Bose On-Ear headphones and enjoy rich-sounding tracks. Video playback was also smooth with synchronized picture and audio.

Using the Tour’s full HTML browser, Aws Wireless full site downloaded in 38 seconds–quite impressive considering other 3G smartphones have taken up to a minute–while CNN’s and ESPN’s mobile sites came up in 7 seconds and 15 seconds. We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again. BlackBerry’s Web browser isn’t the best. It’s come a long way and it’s much less annoying to navigate with the onscreen cursor and different page views, but still there’s a lot to be desired.

Since our review unit didn’t include VZ Navigator, we couldn’t really try out the voice-guided navigation. Yet, we used BlackBerry Maps, which was able to give accurate directions to our destinations. The GPS signal was pretty good; from a cold start, the cell phone was able to locate our location within two minutes and subsequent starts were a little faster at about a minute or less.

The RIM BlackBerry Tour comes with a 1400mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 5 hours and up to 14 days of standby time. In our battery drain tests, the BlackBerry Tour beat the rated talk time by 1.5 hours.