My review of the Blackberry Tour: Showdown between Winmo and RIM.

I recently made the switch from the HTC Touch Pro to the Blackberry Tour. I am on sprint's network and they made me an upgrade offer I couldn't refuse. So far the Tour is one of the best phones I have ever had. It is an email and messaging powerhouse, has thousands of apps, gets good battery life and is a 1000 times more stable and dependable hardware wise then anything I had from HTC. As I sit here in austin airport looking around, of the people surrounding me with cell phones in their hands, I count 6 iphones, 5 blackberries, and what seems to be a g1. I also spot what seems to be a droid and a htc hero. I don't have many gripes about my blackberry except that I wish it had a touch screen (sometimes) and used the regular mini usb charger connector instead of the slimmer one (all the time). I had to get rid of all the chargers I had previously. Also I wish that the Tour did automatic reverse lookup when I just stat dialing a phone number. My old Touch Pro did it, auto sorting as you typed more numbers until it had matched up a contact. Something little I appreciated. I also would love for RIM to allow auto sorting of the email inbox as you type key words. Say I wanted to pull up emails from Clifton, all I should have to do is start typing his name or even a subject we had talked about before and the phone sorts and pulls up all of our interactions. The way it is set up now I have to press "s" and then type in a key word or person and then ask it to search and match it up.Another thing I wish they had done better is placing the speaker on both sides or even the back of the phone. Also my Berry is horrendous voice quality wise in the wind. Completely unusable for a voice convo. The keyboard on the Tour has less buttons then the Touch Pro but I like the keyboard just as much. Typing long emails can make your hands a little sore and give you berry thumb though. The holster that comes with the phone is very nice Ad the phone senses when it is in the holster compared to being pulled out. I also like that the screen brightens automatically to a wonderful reading level when it senses it is outdoors in direct sunlight. Lastly, the web browsing on the blackberry leaves MUCH to be desired compared to the iphones and winmo phones of the world. This ancient RIM browser needs a complete overhaul. In the interest of full disclosure, I am running an unreleased 5.0 rom on my phone and it is fantastic. New messaging options, faster boot up time, and dozens of other improvements. I can't wait for it to officially release. In the meantime, for all your berry needs and information, I highly recommend visiting crackberry.com.
Sent on the Sprint® Now Network from my BlackBerry®