I’ve had a BlackBerry 8703e through Verizon Wireless for almost 3 years and was largely satisfied with it. The device has been rock solid and stable with no misbehavior. Enterprise eMail worked flawlessly and I could access the intranet at work. The battery had become significantly weaker and I had endured it for almost a year since I was waiting to upgrade. I tried the Storm eagerly but while its soft keyboard with tactile feedback was a significant improvement over the iPhone/iPod experience, I was not yet ready to wean myself off a physical QWERTY keyboard.

BlackBerry Tour holds promise with its elegant design and multimedia capabilities. It is significantly smaller, lighter, sleeker, shinier than the 8703. The keys are closer and are etched so you can feel them in the dark. The etching is on one side of the key so you end up pressing it down on the other side, which takes a bit of getting used to. The alt key is on the left side and typing the numbers 4 and 7 are somewhat of a challenge since they are pretty close to the alt key. People will bigger hands will find it really difficult. The trackball is quite sensitive. Horizontal scrolling takes getting used to and for some reason, I am finding it easier to use on one hand than the other.

The bedside mode wasn’t available on the 8703 and it lets you control the radio, LED and display settings. I dont know if the device is intelligent enough to stop checking eMail messages in the bedside mode. That could extend the battery life. Speaking of battery, I’m noticing that it takes significantly longer (than the 8703) to fully charge the battery, even when the phone is plugged into the wall socket.

It was an easy transition for me and I was up and running in no time. One of the first things I did was to register the phone at work for enterprise service and install the BlackBerry App World client to check out available third-party applications. This is been written about in the media and while the selection is fairly small compared to the iPhone app store, there are still hundreds of applications available. Curiously, google maps and TwitterBerry are not available on the App World but they can be downloaded directly from google and Orangatame’s website. Instant messenger clients are very handy and messages can optionally be integrated right into the email client.

The Tour has a built-in 3.2 megapixel camera with options to control image size, autofocus (although the focus area is quite large), color (normal, B&W, Sepia), image stabilization and built-in flash activation. The image quality is decent for a camera phone but noise is clearly visible even on images shot in broad daylight. There is also a video camera, again of very good quality and handy. Audio quality is quite clear and crisp.

Since I had shot some pictures, videos and voice recordings, I decided to install the Desktop Manager application to synchronize to the desktop. During the application install, unfortunately, I selected the Enterprise Server option. This screwed up my email accounts by setting up my hotmail address a redirector for work email. As a consequence, I stopped being able to send or receive eMails through my work address. This morning, I spent 45 mins on phone, first with Verizon Wireless help staff then first-level RIM support. Finally, I was put in touch with second-level support who diagnosed the problem and tried resetting the security token. That didn’t solve the problem and I had to go back to my IT to re-send service books. Unfortunately, to re-activate enterprise services, my device was wiped clean and I lost all the contacts I had updated recently. The applications I installed were intact since they were presumably installed on the flash card, not native memory.

Fully charging the battery took roughly 130 minutes with the radio turned ON and bluetooth turned OFF and with no phone use during charging except a couple of times when I checked the battery status to time the process.

Voice quality on the Tour seems inferior to that on the 8703. People at the other end have commented that the voice seems very distant, on both bluetooth and direct from the handset. The microphone on the Tour is located on the face below the keyboard and left of center. In comparison, the microphone on the 8703 is located on the front face. When held with the left hand, I suspect the Tour’s microphone has a more difficult time picking up the signals. Switching hands seems to improve voice quality, presumably because the microphone ends up closer to the mouth.

Blackberry desktop manager has good integration with iTunes (via the Media sync application) to import playlists and sychronize them with the Tour. The app is intelligent enough to skip over DRM-protected tracks. It doesn’t honor the track selections in iTunes playlist and syncs the entire playlist to the Tour. I wish RIM had paid more attention to improving the usability of the desktop application. For one, there are way too many password prompts. Synchronization causes the device screen to flicker often between the clock view (default when charging), a screen that (I think) says “Connecting to Computer” and a screen that shows a pictorial representation of a computer and the Tour sychronizing. On the positive side, the desktop manager un-syncs playlists when they are unchecked on the media manager.

The BlackBerry Media Sync application can move images and videos produced on the device to the computer and MP3 files from the computer to the device. It skips over MP4 video files on the computer (I follow a few video podcasts). To copy those to the device, I have to switch to the Roxio Media Manager application. The applications should be better integrated – there is no reason why the customer should know which application to use for which files. The Media Manager provides options on converting the videos so they are optimized for the device.

On the whole, I have been generally happy with the Tour. With the ability to play podcasts on the phone, I see myself using my iPod Touch less often. I have started on a project to shoot a picture a day on the Tour and share them via twitter. BTW, with TwitterBerry installed, you have the option of directly uploading the images to twitter from the device. However, due to the EDGE network and twitpic’s bandwidth, it is nearly impractical to upload the images this way. I’ve found it much easier to email the image from the device and uploading it to Twitter from the desktop. It would have been a huge win if the Tour were WiFi capable.