According to research done by analyst David Eller at TownHall Investment Research, return rates of BlackBerry Tour 9630 handsets to Sprint and Verizon might be as high as 50-percent. The most frequent complaint is believed to be problems with the QWERTY smartphone’s trackball, but somewhat bizarrely Eller also claims that people are “complaining about the sensitivity of the touch screen”. We’d suggest that’s probably because the Tour doesn’t actually have a touchscreen.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, there is a line from the Red Queen, in which she states, “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” In evolution, this is a theory that is also known as an “arms race to nowhere”, in which two different species evolve in tandem, one after the other, in an infinite loop. The reason, is because as one system evolves, then the other must evolve with it, just to keep pace.
And so the system is unending and essential for the survival of a species.
It’s no different in the technology ecosystem. In fact, it’s a lot more evident there, as we can see the fruits of these evolutionary developments as clear as day. We watched as the iPhone became the iPhone 3G, and while it may not have been leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor in a lot of ways, we witnessed the 3G become the 3GS. And in turn, we saw almost every other major phone manufacturer develop phones to counter the iPhone. You’ve heard of them: the mythical iPhone killer.
One of the most recent devices announced by RIM was the Blackberry Tour. The smartphone is already offered on the Verizon and Sprint networks and is now making the move to the Alltel network as well.
Having promised their respective versions back in June, both Sprint and Verizon have now officially released the BlackBerry Tour 9630. In effect the 3G version of the Curve, we reviewed the Tour 9630 over at PhoneMag and came away impressed by its usable QWERTY keyboard and sturdy build.
Verizon have released details of their version of the BlackBerry Tour, which we now know will be released on July 12th. Priced at $199.99 with a two-year agreement, the Tour has both EVDO Rev.A for use in the US and UMTS HSPA 2100MHz support for high-speed access while roaming.
We’ve been singularly cellularly obsessed here at SlashGear over the past seven days, and it’ll come as no surprise that the run-up to the iPhone 3G S has occupied much of our attention. The new Apple smartphone may not look much different to its predecessor, but if our hands-on first impressions are anything to go by, Cupertino have done their best to make the user-experience as polished as the casing. Still, it’s not just shiny Apple hardware that’s caught our eye this week; Novatel Wireless’ GSM MiFi 2352 piqued our interest when we talked to the company themselves on Monday, and then proceeded to impress us considerably in our full review.
Sprint and Verizon may be keeping relatively quiet about the BlackBerry Tour 9630’s functionality, but unsurprisingly RIM themselves are pretty keen to get the news out there about exactly what their new “world phone” can do. The smartphone is primarily intended to use CDMA EVDO Rev.A connectivity, but it also packs UMTS/HSPA 2100MHz support and quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE for use when abroad.
Elsewhere there’s a 480 x 340 resolution display, 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus and image stabilization, and 256MB of onboard storage with a microSD card to augment that. The Tour 9630 also has GPS with support for photo geotagging.
Video overview after the cut
Verizon isn’t letting Sprint have all the BlackBerry Tour fun, and while there’s no official press release as yet the smartphone has shown up on the carrier’s site. Tipped for a Verizon launch back in May, when the smartphone was spotted in the carrier’s inventory system, there’s no sign of a specific release date.
After months of leaks regarding the handset, Sprint has announced that they will be offering the BlackBerry Tour. Packed with EVDO Rev.A and 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus, the Tour also has 2100MHz UMTS/HSPA and quadband GSM for international roaming use; it’s expected to arrive “later this summer” in the US.
It looks, judging by these images, like someone has been faxing something they shouldn’t have, but when the leak is a detailed spec-sheet for the BlackBerry Tour 9630 we won’t quibble over it coming on thermal paper. According to MobileSyrup’s source, the Tour 9630 will arrive on Canadian carrier Bell in mid-July, bringing with it an HVGA 480 x 360 display, 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera with flash, quadband GSM/GPRS/EDGE, 2100MHz UMTS/HSPA and 800/1900MHz EVDO Rev.A.
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