Rim Tour 9630 Smartphone
- Screen Size (Diagonal): 2.44 inch
- Installed Memory: 256 MB
- Operating System: BlackBerry OS
- Connectivity: Bluetooth
- Performance: Quad Band
- Design: Mobile
- Overview
-
Reviews
- Compare Prices
User ReviewRead All Reviews »
Capable of much, much more, but constrained to be a lesser smart phone.
Pros
Great photography, qwerty tactile keyboard makes text-entry easy
Cons
Support is difficult to come by, number entry is far from simple in text mode
Recommended it?
No
The Bottom Line:
Lack of apps makes it a loser, but there's no beating a smart phone of any type for keeping up with emails. Web browsing is PAINFULLY slow.
If a person had to choose between the two most popular smart phones on the market, their choices would initially be limited to those offered by their favorite provider. It's no secret that at this time, the two largest service providers supply the two most popular smart phones, and only service carrying the iphone is AT&T; the flagship phone of Verizon is the Blackberry, at least for now.
In my case, my employer permits its minions to only use Verizon, and... the only approved smart phone in Verizon's array of offerings is the Blackberry.
Included in the Blackberry's list of undocumented features is that at first it would seem that the unit only retains the previous one week's history of phone calls; even the dumb phone I owned previously was capable of listing the last year's worth of calls. Now, Blackberry claims that the duration of the history is limited only by the bounds of the installed memory. This statement applies if you happen to know the number you dialed, as you CAN view the history of that call you dialed, but if you had hoped to follow up with that special someone who called 15 days prior, you'll be wishing that you'd added them as a contact, because they're, well, pre-historic.
When it comes to multimedia, it wouldn't be fair to make a comparison between the 'berry and the iphone. The iphone was built by a company with a strong background in multimedia applications and hardware, and the iphone excels in this regard. The Blackberry was designed to be a business tool to extend a desk-jockey’s reach beyond the four walls of an office, and it does so quite well.
When it comes to comparing application availability between the two phones, there just is no comparison. At this time, there are over 115,000 apps available for the iphone. It’s no surprise that the total number of applications for the ‘berry is a number not bragged about. The best number I’ve been able to find on a tally of Blackberry apps is around 3000. For every pay or free app for the Blackberry, it’s a safe bet that there are 20 FREE iphone apps. Even if you cannot find the new iphone app of your dreams at a $0 price, chances are it’s there for less than a buck. Good luck finding the same in the Blackberry “App World”, the $5.99 price tag seems to be a common theme. Many iphone apps have a no-cost version of the full featured apps, this is not usually the case for Blackberry.
The number of usable Blackberry may be further limited by your Blackberry type (many apps warn that they are not compatible with the Storm). If that app of choice uses the hard-wired, on-board GPS unit on the ‘berry, Verizon users need not apply. Verizon has been effective in blocking applications from accessing the gps locator feature of the Blackberry. Verizon’s greed is the only reason for this restriction, they openly encourage their users to spend $10 a month for their “VZ Navigator” on top of their $130 monthly broadband phone fee. Without that gps location feature, applications that provide weather, local shopping, local phone directories, you name it, aren’t nearly as effective if you have to type in the zip code for your search each time.
The amount of time it takes to install or remove an app on the Blackberry tour is baffling; installing an application takes priority over all other operations in progress, so forget about receiving phone calls during that installation process (plan ahead). The time to process the removal of an application makes me wonder if this little guy is running some old form of DOS. It actually took SEVENTEEN MINUTES to remove a 691k application! I have yet to find an application that can be removed without having to re-boot the unit, and that re-boot takes TEN MINUTES of that seventeen!
Heaven forbid your employer chooses to monitor and control your every move via Blackberry’s “Enterprise Server”. Don’t expect your corporate IT professional to know all aspects of ES functionality, but when you read this from the list of benefits of ES: “Manage your Blackberry environment with the new BlackBerry® Administration Service which provides web-based access to centralized management tools”, as the end user, you should read this benefit as “allow your IT professional complete access to your internet history, internet browsing permissions, email settings, and so on”. Setting up a standard email signature line should be simple, but it’s anything but when big brother’s in control. Don’t trouble yourself with contacting your cellular service provider for support; they’ll make every effort to accommodate you, but in the end, it comes down to the level of constriction imposed by your all-knowing IT staff. Without ES, you would lose a lot of essential features like, say, corporate email, and calendar synchronization, but the ES functionality comes with a hefty price tag, conveniently payable on a monthly basis on the plan of each phone (at least with Verizon). I can’t imagine why my employer sees fit to block ebay from my list of allowed web sites, but I do take issue with the fact that it has the ability to censor what I do in my personal time. About 5 weeks into my service with our corporate ES package, someone in IT must have figured out how they can force users to enter a password to unlock their phone if it hasn’t been used in five minutes, try to imagine how annoying that might be.
Lock-ups aren’t common, but they’re not unheard of. I’ve had to re-boot my unit five times in three months, I can accept those numbers. However, the 10-minute downtime during the reboot is unacceptable. The only method of initiating a true re-boot is to pull the battery, otherwise a power-down action is more of a standby mode.
In my case, my employer permits its minions to only use Verizon, and... the only approved smart phone in Verizon's array of offerings is the Blackberry.
Included in the Blackberry's list of undocumented features is that at first it would seem that the unit only retains the previous one week's history of phone calls; even the dumb phone I owned previously was capable of listing the last year's worth of calls. Now, Blackberry claims that the duration of the history is limited only by the bounds of the installed memory. This statement applies if you happen to know the number you dialed, as you CAN view the history of that call you dialed, but if you had hoped to follow up with that special someone who called 15 days prior, you'll be wishing that you'd added them as a contact, because they're, well, pre-historic.
When it comes to multimedia, it wouldn't be fair to make a comparison between the 'berry and the iphone. The iphone was built by a company with a strong background in multimedia applications and hardware, and the iphone excels in this regard. The Blackberry was designed to be a business tool to extend a desk-jockey’s reach beyond the four walls of an office, and it does so quite well.
When it comes to comparing application availability between the two phones, there just is no comparison. At this time, there are over 115,000 apps available for the iphone. It’s no surprise that the total number of applications for the ‘berry is a number not bragged about. The best number I’ve been able to find on a tally of Blackberry apps is around 3000. For every pay or free app for the Blackberry, it’s a safe bet that there are 20 FREE iphone apps. Even if you cannot find the new iphone app of your dreams at a $0 price, chances are it’s there for less than a buck. Good luck finding the same in the Blackberry “App World”, the $5.99 price tag seems to be a common theme. Many iphone apps have a no-cost version of the full featured apps, this is not usually the case for Blackberry.
The number of usable Blackberry may be further limited by your Blackberry type (many apps warn that they are not compatible with the Storm). If that app of choice uses the hard-wired, on-board GPS unit on the ‘berry, Verizon users need not apply. Verizon has been effective in blocking applications from accessing the gps locator feature of the Blackberry. Verizon’s greed is the only reason for this restriction, they openly encourage their users to spend $10 a month for their “VZ Navigator” on top of their $130 monthly broadband phone fee. Without that gps location feature, applications that provide weather, local shopping, local phone directories, you name it, aren’t nearly as effective if you have to type in the zip code for your search each time.
The amount of time it takes to install or remove an app on the Blackberry tour is baffling; installing an application takes priority over all other operations in progress, so forget about receiving phone calls during that installation process (plan ahead). The time to process the removal of an application makes me wonder if this little guy is running some old form of DOS. It actually took SEVENTEEN MINUTES to remove a 691k application! I have yet to find an application that can be removed without having to re-boot the unit, and that re-boot takes TEN MINUTES of that seventeen!
Heaven forbid your employer chooses to monitor and control your every move via Blackberry’s “Enterprise Server”. Don’t expect your corporate IT professional to know all aspects of ES functionality, but when you read this from the list of benefits of ES: “Manage your Blackberry environment with the new BlackBerry® Administration Service which provides web-based access to centralized management tools”, as the end user, you should read this benefit as “allow your IT professional complete access to your internet history, internet browsing permissions, email settings, and so on”. Setting up a standard email signature line should be simple, but it’s anything but when big brother’s in control. Don’t trouble yourself with contacting your cellular service provider for support; they’ll make every effort to accommodate you, but in the end, it comes down to the level of constriction imposed by your all-knowing IT staff. Without ES, you would lose a lot of essential features like, say, corporate email, and calendar synchronization, but the ES functionality comes with a hefty price tag, conveniently payable on a monthly basis on the plan of each phone (at least with Verizon). I can’t imagine why my employer sees fit to block ebay from my list of allowed web sites, but I do take issue with the fact that it has the ability to censor what I do in my personal time. About 5 weeks into my service with our corporate ES package, someone in IT must have figured out how they can force users to enter a password to unlock their phone if it hasn’t been used in five minutes, try to imagine how annoying that might be.
Lock-ups aren’t common, but they’re not unheard of. I’ve had to re-boot my unit five times in three months, I can accept those numbers. However, the 10-minute downtime during the reboot is unacceptable. The only method of initiating a true re-boot is to pull the battery, otherwise a power-down action is more of a standby mode.
