Unboxing the BlackBerry 9630 (Tour)
With all the brouhaha caused by the Motorola Droid, I’ve been neglecting some of the other recent arrivals. Last week at the Sprint Open Developer Conference, in addition to getting a free HTC Hero, I also scored a free BlackBerry 9630 (Tour)!
In the past, I’ve enjoyed the BlackBerry 8320 (Curve) and, although the BlackBerry 9530 (Storm) was a total disaster, I was impressed with its CDMA+GSM radio and its excellent camera. The Tour is the best of both worlds – a traditional BlackBerry like the Curve with the same trick radio and camera as the Storm…
The only major sticking point about the Tour is the lack of WiFi. How can any manufacturer/carrier consider making/selling a phone without WiFi these days?
The Gobi radio from Qualcomm works on CDMA/EVDO networks (US 800/1900 MHz) as well as GSM/EDGE (worldwide quad-band) and UMTS/HSDPA (Euro/Asia 2100 MHz) networks. This particular Tour came factory unlocked, which is rather strange – but I’m not complaining :)
Anyway, take a look at my unboxing, complete with pictures and video.
tnkgrl Mobile: Tech that Matters 
Believe it or not, but it was actually deemed a selling point at one point. Sprint and Verizon considered EV-DO so superior to UMTS, that they felt it was fine to forego Wi-Fi.
HSPA has narrowed the gap, but the real reason they want Wi-Fi has been echoed to me loud and clear: They want to offload data usage to the traditional ISPs. This has nothing to do with breathtaking speeds, and everything to do with bandwidth consumption. After all, how much faster can a BlackBerry really go with Wi-Fi?
Makes sense… Still, no WiFi = fail today!
I have the blackberry tour and have an isue with the trackball do you have any advise. Also, i watched your vid on the mods to the aspireone, nice. I called for tech support and they jacked my bios up.
Thats a good video. I think they would roll out future models with wi-fi. Its not uncommon to mix features to meet market requirements.