You might say that Verizon's brand new
BlackBerry Tour 9630...
ahem, took a "tour" through our offices this morning, gracing us with its QWERTY-having, global-roaming,
8830-killing presence. There's absolutely no question it's the best-looking CDMA BlackBerry to date and we also think you'll be able to stop
Bold owners in their tracks as you flash this thing around town; we'd argue that the
Curve 8900 is still a cuter handset when you take the company's lineup as a whole, but then again, the 8900 lacks 3G, and the Tour's keyboard might just be the best RIM's ever crafted for a phone. Bottom line, owners of any BlackBerry on Verizon or Sprint should be salivating at the sight of this thing -- and if they're not, honestly, they need their salivary glands checked. Stay tuned for our full review, but in the meantime, enjoy an unboxing and a few quick shots of the Tour taking its first breaths!
posted Jul 1st 2009 12:12PM
Is this any better than the Bold?
it does not have WIFI ... so for me no
None of the Verizon Blackberries have WIFI.
I still see plenty of them being used.
It must not be a big deal to some.
You can buy a WIFI equipped Blackberry from another carrier.
I've been using WiFi equipped phones for about two years now, and I've honestly only used it a small handful of times. Seems like a pretty overrated feature to me. Handy to have just-in-case, but not really a dealbreaker if absent.
Wifi on a phone is an "overrated feature???"
LOL!
The need for Wi-Fi depends on where you use the device most. If you have excellent 3G coverage in both home and workplace then, sure, it isn't that big of a deal. For those of us without such perfect coverage, Wi-Fi is essential to a good smartphone experience. Plus, they generally are more efficient in terms of battery usage, especially in areas of spotty coverage. Honestly, I don't get Verizon. Everyone has all-you-can-eat data with these things, so they aren't losing revenue if they add Wi-Fi. To the contrary, they are just offloading some of the network traffic which should HELP decrease costs and increase profits. MAYBE they could lose some revenue to folks installing VOIP apps, but given that such apps have been available for Win-Mo devices for years and seem not to be making a dent, this seems like a lame excuse. Any other reasons why they wouldn't?? Obviously the reasons aren't technical ones...
The reason you want Wifi is because you are not on Verizon. I have no desire for it on my current blackberry because I always have great 3G everywhere I go. I can see why you wouldn't want it on At&T but it's pointless on Verizon. Especially for a blackberry.
I don't get "World Phone" which you are expected to use when you travel outside your non-roaming area (and thus dam expensive), does not have WIFI. It's very common to use SKYPE on smartphones these days ... plus I would love to see your data plan charges after a week in Europe (with WIFI you can turn off the data roaming and still get all emails in hotel, coffee shops, ....).
@JimboJones - of course, you know, they (your cell carrier) doesn't want you to use Skype. Skype doesn't make them any money. Expensive international roaming fees make them money. There's a good reason why carriers don't like WiFi....
"There's a good reason why carriers don't like WiFi...."
I kinda get your point, I actually think operators like it because it helps to lower the 3G network data usage (if it's not voice service, but video/audio streaming or web browsing) .....
I was a big Verizon fan, I loved their service, but switched to AT&T because I travel to Europe once a year and simply need solid device which works without paying $300 each trip on roaming charges.
@Jimbo Jones..
I traveled to Europe last summer and I'm going again next week.
I have a Verizon World Blackberry (Storm now) had an 8830 before.
They Prorate the International Data for you while your over there. It's $64.99 for international unlimited (5gb) for the days your in there.
So $64.99 / 30 = $2.16 per day. x 8 days = $17.33
Then $29.99 / 30 = $1 per day x 22 days = $22
Total data for the month = $39.33
The Wifi for Skype / Voice yes would definitely be worth it. But for data Wifi isn't needed over there.
Blackberry messenger is free over there too because it's considered data.
I DO have my phone unlocked though and considering getting a prepaid sim card while over there to talk to other people that are also in Europe at the same time. The prices that these carriers charge us for roaming is VERY expensive! $1.99 -$2.99 per minute in Europe (Both ATT AND VERIZON).
That said.. having Wifi wouldn't be a bad feature to just have as long as it doesn't cost more than $20 to add to the phone cost. (Which it shouldn't) anything higher than that I would do without wifi.
It's a world phone and by law Verizon is required to give you the unlock code for the phone to use it overseas. (or borders, if you so choose). As for wifi, it has nothing to do with Verizon. Sprint's won't have wifi either, nor did RIM plan it in. If you go to the RIM site and look at the Tour, it doesn't have wifi in it's non-branded version either. If anybody is at fault for it not having wifi it's RIM for not planning it into the phone in general. I actually haven't heard of any hardware throttles that Verizon has done on this. Let's hope the GPS on google maps works. :)
Oh I wish the 8900 had 3G! The Bold's build quality is shoddy at best.
ok the bold looked really nice design wise, but I wish they wouldnt just shove the same similar look into their other phones. I think the tour looks half hearted
Finally, Verizon gets a BlackBerry worth a damn.
The Storm was crappier than The Chevy Chase Show and Biodome combined, with a side of Battlefield Earth for desert.
I have a Storm and I really like it. Despite that I am considering trading it for a Tour just because I type a LOT and no touch screen phone can match a physical keyboard in typing.
I love the Storm... have you ever used it your-self? I doubt it...
Yes, I've used it. I had one for 3 weeks before returning it and I wrote a pretty extensive review of what's wrong with it.
I thought it was a great phone. There are certainly better options and I can see why certain people would be frustrated with it, but it worked well for me.
I like mine as well. It wasn't great with the original firmware but after some leaked updates I honestly wonder how people didn't like it. I type just as fast as iPhone owners with less mistakes and the OS is nearly bug free, yet I continue to hear inpatient former owners who say "I ditched mine after a week."
We get it, you lost a bunch of money off trading it in and your pissed. We don't care, so stop trashing a phone you don't own.
I love Blackberry products and my 8900...... but why oh why can't Blackberry stop messing about and put 3G as the standard in their product line-up!!!!!!
LOOK its a bold with a verizon logo. RIM sucks. Update your pager based OS you losers!!!!!
Why are you getting so angry? Are you okay? You know, it's just a phone! Did the phone say do something to offend you? Are you angry are the wall today too? If I told you that these materialistic things cannot talk would you believe me?
Ha ha ha ha... boy you have some credibility!
The biggest difference between the Tour and the Storm, aside from the obvious physical keyboard, is the 256MB of internal memory.
No 3G and no Wi-fi. Why the hell would I want this phone? What a waste of plastic.
go to here...
http://estore.vzwshop.com/bbtour/
see how many times you see 3G...
what are you talking about? all cdma blackberries have 3g, even the ones that didn't on gsm networks like the pearl, pearl flip, and original curve.
I see 3G 3 times.
3! Do I win a cookie?
My bust. Saw the lack of 3G associated with 8900. Missed that part. Still no wi-fi. No thanks.
no wifi = fail...and go ahead all the bb fanboys saying "we dont need wifi use your laptop" just making up excuses wifi should be there you never know when you need it
Or...I don't know...you could always go "to each their own," rather than just blindly bash a device for a feature you think it ought to have.
There are many things I wish the iPhone had, one of which being a physical keyboard rather than a ridiculous virtual one. It's still a nice device and works well for some people but not for others. Some people live and die by Wifi....some don't. It's good to have choice and competition for comsumers.
To each their own...
One of the screw-ups with this design is that you need to remove the phone from the case to charge it.
I'm a WinMo user and I don't think i've ever in my WinMo life used WiFi. Looks like a good solid phone.
yeah me too i never use wifi but you never know when u might need it
Windows WiFiRouter?
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/01/19/download-wmwifirouter-free-to-transform-your-windows-mobile-device-to-wireless-router/
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/01/19/download-wmwifirouter-free-to-transform-your-windows-mobile-device-to-wireless-router/
don't know why you need wi-fi when you have astonishingly fast 3G speeds on Americas most reliable 3G network..
sprint should include wimax on theirs
What about the BB Onyx that I read about a while ago? That had 3G and WiFi and similar specs to this... when is that thing hitting the shelves!?
that is heading for at&t late this year/early next year. There still are no confirmed dates for it though.
I had a few areas where no cellphones would work, such as my lakehouse. Dead zone for every carrier. WiFi is a life saver there, now only if AT&T would allow UMA...
Point aside. This is a great BB and, as a iPhone3GS covert from a 8330, I am definitely jealous of this beautiful business device.
Truth is , I use wifi a lot ( UMA ) when I travel, its nice to know that u get to keep your number and not pay when travelling over seas. Lack of wifi on the storm was really bad for me, besides typing on the touch screen.
So many Centro knockoffs..
Your kidding right? Centro knockoff? Actually I think it's the other way around buddy. RIM has had the qwerty keyboards for a long while LONG before palm even thought of the centro.
I find it amazing that RIM can pump out so many phones with such minor differences. Cool that it's working for them, I guess, but it seems like they'd be better off making a smaller number of models and making them well known. Sort of like HTC's Touch lineup, there's a number of models out there, but they're all pretty easy to tell apart and have distinct feature sets for different target demographics. RIM just throws out a couple dozen portrait, non-touch, qwerty candybars a year with minor differences and names them with seemingly random four digit numbers, I can't tell them apart!
They have to make different devices for the carriers. The carriers are what pushes them to make different devices. If Apple made an iphone for Verizon it would have "minor" differences. And actually I would argue that the screen, wifi, worldwide card make this phone very different from the other devices. I think you mean aesthetically different which doesn't matter.
maybe i'm just crazy......but doesn't this look just like any other current BlackBerry out there? What's the big deal?
The big deal is that I can drop off my 8830 and pick up a new phone that looks like the picture at the top of the page...
Why does everyone on engadget expect device manufacturers to keep changing the way their phones look?
What should be more important is that they look good not different or am I crazy? Phones in general, across all manufacturers don't look that much different...
it's a little thing called PROGRESS! nothing wrong with having a few models that are consistent in form factor but why make such a huge deal about this one if there aren't many changes? anyway, i was just asking.......i don't know if there are some major changes under the hood that is worthy of all the hoopla.
answer me this though.........would u be fine if your CAR had the same body and form since back in the 80s?? Alot of ppl like change man!
@bjorn
hey, guess what. a car still has four wheels, an angine, headlights, tail lights, front and rear bumpers, exhaust, and a cabin which holds seats for divers and passengers, steering wheel, etc...oh how far we have come since the '80s.
my point is, why change a proven highly successful form factor?
update it, make it sleeker, make it faster, sure.
if it aint broke, don't fix it!
He's right. I mean, look at the iPhone. It looks sooooo different than the one they released over 2years ago....
You're not crazy, it does look very similar to current BB models. It's what's under the hood that makes a big difference. Check out the specs on the RAM and other features of the Tour that should make it run faster than any current Blackberry.
actually bjorn.. i prefer older cars myself.. a devices looks are only part of its functionality.. iphone for instance.. looks good.. fails as a smart phone, on a horrible network.. but by gawd, it looks good.
Does anyone know if Verizon crippled the use of this phone's internal GPS features with 3rd party applications like they did with the 8830WE?
With OS 4.5, GPS was effectively unlocked on VZW phones (my 8830 WE). I never got it working with Google Maps, and instead had to use the BB Maps application. With the Tour (9630) running 4.7.1, I will have at least that capability, potentially the ability to use it across the platform.
I still dont understand why the battery killing wifi is that big of a deal? Chances r you have the 30 data plan with a smartphone, so its unlimited, and on top of it you arent using atat or tmobiles awful service so you have signal strength everywhere! I have had 3 phones with wifi (all winmo) and I used the feature 3 times, mostly to crash my friends routers for fun, I never needed it. I get some people in office buildings may like it, but again unless ur tmobile no need for that option. I might trade my storm for this!
While verizon does indeed provide an extensive (expensive) and (mostly) efficient network in north america, the exclusion of wifi in a 'world' phone is almost a deal breaker because i can't imagine verizon has an extensive or efficient network in, say, rural nicaragua or cairo or beijing. The point being that wifi is a life saver and practical necessity for anyone who travels abroad, especially to more remote places on this planet. The exclusion of wifi on this phone is truly a disappointment for many potential purchasers of this phone, and for myself, a verizon customer, it makes an instant pruchase and renewal of contract turn into a very drawn out maybe. For god sakes verizon, what is the logic?
On another note, I see that "micro sd" wifi enabled cards can be purchased for around 30 bucks, anyone know if these will work in the Tour? It's lookin like that fabled Atlas is little more than a fable at this point.....
I agree about the need for wifi on this phone.
Maybe corporate users are not cost conscious re calls back to America, but individual travelers are. I travel quite a lot overseas and like to use a worldphone with local SIM cards and have wifi for Skype calls back home to family etc. It's quite amazing that RIM have made this mitsake on their newest world phone. I might cause me to have to buy another make of phone sadly. Yup I do travel with another computer, usually a natbook and those use wifi but it's so much more convenient to carry around one device during ones daily routine.
Be careful what you wish for.
WiFi on the BlackBerry is essentially broken. Not only do apps need to be specially coded to use a WiFi connection that doesn't go through RIM's proxies (so many apps won't work over WiFi), but it also has problems connecting through various ISPs and DNS servers via WiFi. And it caches DNS errors and won't retry, so if you happen to get a DNS error while connecting to a site, you'll be locked out of that site for a day or so. On my Curve with WiFi, every streaming radio app (Pandora, Slacker) that I have tried does not work over WiFi.
RIM really has dropped the ball here. Their WiFi implementation is really lacking and I can see why it's not offered on more devices. And with their CEO saying things like BlackBerry is a network appliance that is tightly integrated into RIM's network, and is NOT a distributed computing device, apparently RIM does not really care about allowing you to connect to the open Internet unless you are going through RIM servers, which explains their poor WiFi implementation.
So would this be considered the Tour tour?
Does anyone know if the Sprint version has Wi-Fi?
Neither version has WiFi. It appears it was Blackberry's decision to not include a WiFi chip. I'm sure a teardown on launch day by iSuppli will confirm either the existance or lack of a wifi chip.
Looks like they are sticking with the micro-USB plug style.
Obama must be thrilled
Looks nice.
this.thing.looks.sliiiiiiiiiick!
my contract has BEEN up and i have been waiting for this bad mamma-jamma.
can't wait to get my paws on this thing.
For the love of god, someone tell me why this phone is getting so much press?! It's a blackberry that looks EXACTLY like all the major blackberry phones already out there (storm and pearl are the oddballs). What's the big deal?
Baffled Blackberry Owner with NE2 Verizon Credit
because verizon and sprint are finally getting an awesome blackberry.
Let's put an end to this - can anyone show me a current CDMA Blackberry on any carrier with embedded WiFi? Obviously VZW isn't against WiFi as they've been releasing it on their other smartphones for quite some time (i.e. i770, i910, XV6800, XV6850, XV6900, etc). Similarly, Sprint has yet to release a CDMA Blackberry with WiFi. Has anyone ever thought that it could be due to the fact that RIM hasn't figured out how to intermingle their hardware, the Qualcomm CDMA (not GSM) chipset, and the WiFi chipset all into one nice bundle?
Could be. But have you ever used a BlackBerry with GSM and WiFi? As I mentioned, WiFi does not work very well on BlackBerries.
It seems like most people do not understand that BlackBerries are not Internet devices like the iPhone, Palm Pre, and Android. BlackBerries are tightly-coupled with RIM's networking architecture (BES and BIS) which enables their push-email. Most BlackBerries are set up so that all network traffic goes through their servers. That's why when the RIM network goes down, there are major outages and no one can use their BlackBerries.
When you buy an iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, Android, or Windows Mobile phone, you expect that when you connect via WiFi, that you completely bypass the cellular network and go straight through your Internet service provider (cable modem, DSL, etc.) with a direct TCP/IP connection. But the BlackBerry doesn't work the same way. It does use WiFi to bypass the cellular network, but it tries to route the networking traffic right through the same RIM or cellular servers. In most cases, you don't have a direct TCP/IP connection. However, RIM has tacked on the ability to establish a direct TCP/IP connection via WiFi, but it's a hack that requires each app on the device to specifically do this on its own. If the app was not written to do this, it won't connect through a direct TCP/IP connection via WiFi. And to make matters worse, the direct-connect WiFi implementation is buggy and you often get connection failures even though your wireless router and Internet connection are fine (e.g., your laptop and other devices connect and work fine through it).
Bottom line: do not buy a BlackBerry for use as a WiFi-connected, Internet appliance. You will be extremely disappointed. BlackBerries are primarily phones with very good push e-mail, but with very basic (and limited) Internet connectivity.
If you are still scratching your head as to why most BlackBerries don't have WiFi, then you really don't understand what a BlackBerry is and what RIM's focus is.
when its going to be available on the market?
Sprint's announced a wifi version coming out next year (2010) at some point, which probably means a Verizon iteration as well. So, those desperate for a new crackberry AND wifi just need a little patience... Though at that point, who knows whether there will be another hot new thing on the market. http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/wifiwimax/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218401494