BlackBerry Tour 9630 (Sprint) Review

The BlackBerry Tour 9630 is a fun phone with its amazing music and video players. In the user interface aspect, it just never disappoints. This will in fact come as a relief to the loyal BlackBerry users.

It has great power management and a rich catalog of third-party Best Blackberry applications.

Software Package

The Sprint Tour is a great voice phone for world-travelers with a good camera and a media player well meeting expectations. It syncs music with iTunes. The web browser that is built-in is a letdown but then there are fabulous alternatives in Opera Mini and Bolt. It can deal with 16 GB cards with ease.
The phone comes with a flock of rich Sprint-specific applications like Sprint TV, Sprint Navigation, Pandora, the Sprint Music Store, etc. It even has Facebook, MySpace, Flickr and IM client applications.

Media Handling

On the BlackBerry Tour, some of the multimedia applications are remarkable. Some others are not satisfactory. Sprint TV delivered at least ten to twelve channels of streaming video without any hassles. Pocket Express delivers news and other information in an easy way. Pandora tuned into many stations and played them well.

The Sprint music store and the player had difficulty presenting some of the music titles for music in AAC format. It played music in a sluggish manner and somehow felt as if it was serving no useful purpose. The NFL Mobile Live was another application that handed over video that was no smooth while playing. However, it had loads of statistics and news at my disposal.
The mobile still had about 99 MB free space after all those applications.

The Tour's 3.2 mega-pixel camera had a satisfactory picture quality but was not up to the expectations in low-light conditions.

World Phone or Not

One big positive to a traveling user from the Sprint Tour was the SIM un-locking policy. Most of the foreign SIM cards which offer lower international rates can be used with this phone without facing many hassles. However, you will not be able to use the BlackBerry data service in that case.
The BlackBerry Tour is a reliable phone assuring performance, working on a time-tested platform. The keyboard is convenient enough for quick data inputs. The battery life is reasonably long at close to five and a half hours of continuous talk time.


The BlackBerry Tour is a dual-mode phone. This means that the handset supports both CDMA and GSM networks. So, locally, the Sprint Tour will use Sprint's CDMA network but will automatically detect and switch to the international GSM bands when traveling overseas.

This smart phone comes with a travel charger but does not have any international adapters for overseas usage.

BlackBerry Tour 9630 Review Conclusion

Eventually, it is BlackBerry's abundance of third party applications that makes the Tour a very desirable phone. There are hundreds of applications that can manage your travel, let you play a video game and even connect to Google Voice.

Until there appears a phone which can do more stuff in a more efficient and consistent way, BlackBerry Tour 9630 is the way to go.