BlackBerry Tour (Verizon)

The new BlackBerry Tour from Verizon wireless combines some of the best features of the BlackBerry Curve and BlackBerry Storm to offer a solid phone all around. The Tour offers a sleek design and offers all of the standard enterprise features people expect from a BlackBerry, without sacrificing many features demanded from the consumer market.

RIM has clearly taken messaging seriously with this phone. In addition to the top notch push e-mail features now expected from RIM, the Tour offers a wide array of other applications allowing the phone to integrate with many of the most common sites and services. AOL Instant Messenger, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger are all available through the Application Center menu.

The high resolution display on the Tour is impressive, and offers exceptional video playback capabilities. All areas are crisp and clear. The resolution of the display does make text in the browser difficult to read without zooming at times, but is a small price to pay for overall clarity. The web browser is very similar to that of the Storm or Bold; clearly not as good as the competition, but certainly usable.

For multimedia playback, the Tour offers both a 3.5mm headphone jack and a speaker. The speaker has sufficient volume, but sound does distort somewhat at high volumes. Music downloads are speedy on Verizon's EV-DO network. Many songs are downloaded in under a minute.

The 3.2 MP autofocus camera built in to the Tour takes sharp photos with good color saturation. The camera can be somewhat slow in taking pictures, but still handles moving objects impressively despite this fact.

Overall, the Tour is easily the best smart phone with Verizon Wireless. Call quality was excellent, and data connections were snappy. BlackBerry owners wishing to upgrade will not be disappointed.