Now it is the most hardest season among smartphone battle. Not long ago, the most famous smartphone manufacturers has launching their own flagship device almost at the same time. The Apple iPhone 3GS, Plam Pre and Nokia N97 are the most significant and hot smartphones on the market now. RIM (Research In Motion), one of the top smartphone manufacturer recently also have join the war with it latest BlackBerry Tour 9630.
Design
The BlackBerry Tour 9630 is actually look pretty much same as BlackBerry Curve 8900. Measuring 112×62x14.2mm, the Tour 9630 also have the size exactly like the BlackBerry Storm. At 130g, the handset is a little bit heavy but still pocketable with the size. The HVGA display measures 2.4-inches diagonally and shows 65,536 colors at a 480×360-pixel resolution. It has very good sunlight legibility and image are bright, crisp. The pixels are even hardly to see! Below the display locate the Talk and End keys, a menu shortcut, a back button, and a trackball navigator. After that, at the lower part is the 35-key QWERTY keyboard that is reminiscent of the one found on the Bold. The actually keyboard is more compact than the Bold’s, but it’s still spacious enough to type long messages on. Plus, the keyboard just had a more high-quality feel compared with the Curve’s where the buttons felt a little plasticky.
Camera
BlackBerry Tour 9630 spot a 3.2 MP camera packed with image stabilization, autofocus, 2x zoom and a LED flash. It can take picture up to 2048×1536 pixels. Also with the GPS facility, geotaging is enable to the taken picture . Video is the additional features of the camera. Picture quality is good but we still wish that colors were slightly brighter. However, the clips we recorded with the Tour had a noticeable amount of ghosting and colour distortion.
Features
The BlackBerry Tour 9630 offers a lot even in terms of entertainment value. There is a built-in media player that able to play MP3/WMA/AAC+ music files as well as MPEG4/WMV/H.263/H.264 video clips. You can download songs directly onto the phone through V Cast Music or stream music from various sites. It supports folders, and will sort your music by Artist, Album and Genres. You will also see a miniature album thumbnail appears when you play the music. Music sounds great, it is even greater if you put on a headset.
Watching video also is very pleasant at this handset, the video quality is really brilliant, thanks for the excellent high resolution screen. However 2.4 inches display a bit small. Unfortunately there is no XviD or DivX support like the Bold or Curve 8900 too.
The BlackBerry Tour supports the 2,100MHz UMTS/HSDPA band, so you can even get 3G support while abroad. You can also access up to 10 personal/business POP3 or IMAP4 e-mail accounts in the help of the fast internet speed. However, unfortunately WiFi is not support, this is really a shame for a business centric phone. For office use, there is a Document Viewer for open your MS files like Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Corel WordPerfect, PDF, JPEG, GIF, and more. Instant messaging is this phone is not limited to BlackBerry Messenger only, there are also preloaded clients IM for Windows Live, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, and AIM for you to keep in touch with your friends and colleague in any version of IM.
Conclusion
The BlackBerry Tour 9630 is still remains is a piece of excellent work by RIM. The decent display and the useful keyboard make it be the one of the finest smartphone in the market. We can tolerate with the absence of some options in phone, but the lack of WiFi is unforgivable. It is really a big shame for a high-end business phone like this. It could be the biggest weakness of this handset.
pretty good phone. i got a good price on one from gsmallover.com
. it works really well, and has long bat life, the only complaint i have is that there’s no wifi and the camera isn’t the best. other than that, i’ve had no other problems