Rim Tour 9630 Smartphone

I have owned the Blackberry tour 9630 for one week, and I'm coming from a Motorola VE20 flip handset.

Everywhere I read, there are just rave reviews for this phone, and that is what made me an early adopter.  I'm sending mine back, and I'm hoping some alternative input can help other people with their decision.

Call quality:
The first thing that disappointed me was that a phone this large receives so poorly.  The Tour 9630 was dropping calls and finding gaps between towers here in town that I never experienced before.
There is a constant high pitch humm during calls that the user hears, but apparently the other party does not.

The mic is either horribly placed or insufficient.  My speech is generally sharp and clear, but I have been often asked to repeat myself because the other party has been unable to hear me.  This can be remedied by using speaker phone or bluetooth, but should you have to? 

This is my first blackberry, and I suspect the rave reviews are from users of previous blackberry models (on average). 

Some of the things that this phone lacked seemed just plain odd.  For example:
Text messaging, voicemail notifications and picture-mail is all lumped into the same folder.  When you click on your messages, you have to sift through your outgoing, incoming, voicemail alerts, and there is no way to arrange them. 
Changing the ringer volume not as simple as adjusting the rocker on the side, you must enter a menu, and if you want to slightly alter the volume specifically down, you must jump through about 5 steps to actually edit the ringer profile.  Just seems odd.

Mine was on the Sprint network, often called the 3G network.  Apparently 3G stands for "Good God Go!!!" because most things loaded slowly, if at all.  The browser use was not much easier than the flip phone.

Probably the greatest discredit to this phone is the random 20 second seizures.  Whether dialing, listening to music, or just navigating menus, the phone occasionaly stops to respond for about 20-30 seconds.  Occasionally single key presses fail to yield a response at all, and it can be confusing which is taking place. 

There were a few things that pulled me towards the Blackberry to begin with.  I liked the easy keyboard, and its layout is reasonable and functional (with the exceptions as noted above).  I wanted that nice big screen, and while it didn't disappoint, so much of it goes unused for most use, it seems like they make the screen larger to hide how big the phone must be for whatever else they have in there.
I wanted to use my phone as a 1. phone 2. gps 3. mp3 player.  Of all these needs, oddly the mp3 player was probably the need most fulfilled.

Lacking an EQ of any sorts, the stock sound for a range of music was very usable.  Adjusting the volume during playback however forced the tracks to also change.  "Locking" the phone stops the tracks from changing, but still allows volume adjustment.  If it wasn't $500, this thing would be comical.

You are notified of incoming messages, calls etc 3 different ways.
1. vibration
2. ringer
3. blinking LED
If you choose to not use the vibration, unbeknownst to you, the phone is allotting the time for the vibe all the same.  If a key is pressed during the time the vibe is going off, or would be going off if you had selected vibe, the ring does not take place, and the LED is your only notification.

Honestly, I could go on for hours.  This phone is attractive, and while quite large, feels nice in the hand.  The menus seem to me to be clumsy, sometimes slow to respond and HORRIBLY incapable of customization.

After 3 days of use, the desktop software apparently imposed its own password, without sharing what it was.  Each time I connected the blackberry to my pc to transfer files, it kept demanding I enter a password, and if you failed to guess it correctly (serious lol) it would delete everything from the phone. 

It seems like the only way to lock the phone is to implement a password protection.  This is supposed to lock the phone when you press the lock button, or a certain amount of time passes.  Sometimes that is 15 seconds, sometimes it's a few minutes.  Minimum 4 character password is pretty strange given a keyboard that does not lend itself to finger finding.

For my purposes, this is a feature.  This is what I'm going to attempt to use to clear my information tomorrow morning, when I put it back in its box and send it back to Sprint.

The battery life was supposedly 4 hours talk or 14 day standby.  Mine was dead every single day, whether it was heavily used or not (stock light settings).

-------------------------------------------------------------------

What did I like about the phone?  The camera, while very very sensitive to motion (tripod for phone?) created a nice image if you could manage to hold it still enough.  The flash was very very bright, but autoshuts off after just a few seconds.


One feature that worked exactly as it should was the voice dialing.  It couldn't recognize contacts worth a sh**, but if you know everyones phone number, it was capable dialing for you.

There is a light sensor in the phone that attempts to save your battery life by adjusting the brightness of the screen at all times.  If you're in a bright room, the screen gets bright.  If you're in a dark space, it goes dim. The change is quite fast and is a full range.  Nifty.  Nifty, but I like to use my phone to navigate the dark sometimes, so I disliked this feature as well, even though it seemed to work as it was intended.

One feature that the Blackberry can tout as unique, that I know of, is some auto correction and punctuation for texting.  I see the other review of this device remarked on the fact that all of the punctuation is manually entered as alt+ which is cumbersome... this is only an issue if your weren't taught proper typing ;)  If you double space after a word, it automatically inserts a period for you.  i is automatically capitalized to I, and when you mistype or misspell a word, it gives you the quick option to see their (often correct) suggestions for replacements.  If texting were a standalone device, this would be the feature that would make this a texting dream (for those of us old enough to be concerned about spelling and punctuation while texting :).