Old Sparkle or New Flame?

[roguerower]

Family contract with Verizon is up but the family re-upped with them so it's time to replace my old phone (Razr). Looking at the Curve 8330 or the Tour. Saw the Tour in person over the weekend and it looked ok. Can anyone give me a personal review on the tour and help me out?

 

[shortylickens]

I have played with the Tour at the store and while I found it to be powerful and have a nice screen, I still prefer the Curve for its size and cost. If money is not an issue and you can deal with the keyboard, I'd say go for the Tour. Seems like folks are already writing plenty of kick-ass applications to take advantage of its superior performance. I dont think its quite in Android or iPhone territory yet, but many people who have grown accustomed to Blackberry's would always take function over pretty colors and sounds.
I did not grow accustomed to my Blackberry so I turned it in and got a Google phone instead. So perhaps my advice isnt helpful.

 

[DivideBYZero]

Go for the Tour. The 83xx series is 3 years old now. The Tour is part of the current generation BB devices with the great KB from the Bold, OS 4.7 and the 360 x 480 screen.

 

[Jodiuh]

Lol, Curve or Tour. C2D or CI7? iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS? Seashells or Charmin?

I used the Curve for about a week sometime last year and wound up taking it back for its old feeling OS, lo res/distant screen, lame camera, clanky/wobbly keys, and overall 3yr old looks. Verizon offered only in those ugly colors too.

So I suffered with a Storm for months. A couple weeks ago, they swapped me for the Tour and I couldn't be happier. If u can get past the no wifi + small screen limitations, you'll be quite happy.

The keyboard has a much more solid feel to it than the Curve and is miles above the Storm. I don't have to be careful about how I type on this device. My thumbs sort of roll around striking keys with whataever part of my thumbs closest. Its very fast and feels good. The backlighting's super bright and very readable wo/ fading. The # keys all light up red, making phone calls easier.

The Storm really limited what I could install with its 128 MB app memory, but the Tour doubled that. I have 24 3rd party apps installed and still boot with 3x the free ram of the Storm. Best of all it does not leak ram like that terrible device did.

How's that? Time for me to get back to Braveheart. Oh, I typed this whole thing out on the Tour using Bolt browser.

 

[roguerower]

Went down and picked up the Tour. Looked at both for about 10 minutes and realized that the Curve did look old whereas the Tour took that new look from the storm but gave it a physical keyboard. Liking it so far, however I have some questions.

Installed Google Mobile and Gmail and my current Top 6 aps are Gmail, Messages, Email, Contacts, Calender, and Opera. When I recieve an email from my gmail account all 3 light up.

1. Should I just scratch gmail and rely on the default Email browser?

2. Any way to retrieve my stored emails from my gmail account?

3. Best mobile browser?

4. Free apps that should be required? (Have Pandora)

Any other tips that you'd like to throw at me I'd appreciate. My last phone was a razr and this is my first venture into the smartphone realm.

 

[bucwylde23]

Great move buying the Tour instead of the Curve, you won't regret it. I had a curve and the Tour is better by FAR.

You can set up your Gmail as IMAP, that should probably show your stored emails. If you go onto the VZW BIS site you go to setup account, enter the email address, and choose to fill in the e-mail settings manually. (I don't do it this way, but I hear it works)

I don't use the Gmail app, either. I just set up my gmail account as pop3 and to leave a copy of the message on the server. Works fine, just make sure you set up a filter in your settings on BIS site to block messages from yourself.

One thing you can do is if you don't want a separate inbox for email/sms, you can combine the two into one. Since there are no custom themes available for now 6 icons on the home screen are valuable real estate for me. Just go into your email inbox -> Options -> General options -> SMS and Email Inboxes set to combined

As far as best browser, Bolt is pretty good. Opera is good also. I use the default along with Bolt/Opera depending on what I'm doing.

Apps that I have installed is Gmaps, BB App world, crackberry app store (better than app world at the moment), twitterberry and beejive IM. I'm waiting to install anymore until I get my Tour replaced. Having issues with the trackball.

One app you might want to take a look at is Quicklaunch. I had it on my Curve and I'm probably going to be purchasing it again for my Tour.

 

[Suspicious-Teach8788]

love the title. i thought i was in the wrong forum for a second.

 

[DivideBYZero]

Originally posted by: Jodiuh
Lol, Curve or Tour. C2D or CI7? iPhone 3G or iPhone 3GS? Seashells or Charmin?

I used the Curve for about a week sometime last year and wound up taking it back for its old feeling OS, lo res/distant screen, lame camera, clanky/wobbly keys, and overall 3yr old looks. Verizon offered only in those ugly colors too.

So I suffered with a Storm for months. A couple weeks ago, they swapped me for the Tour and I couldn't be happier. If u can get past the no wifi + small screen limitations, you'll be quite happy.

The keyboard has a much more solid feel to it than the Curve and is miles above the Storm. I don't have to be careful about how I type on this device. My thumbs sort of roll around striking keys with whataever part of my thumbs closest. Its very fast and feels good. The backlighting's super bright and very readable wo/ fading. The # keys all light up red, making phone calls easier.

The Storm really limited what I could install with its 128 MB app memory, but the Tour doubled that. I have 24 3rd party apps installed and still boot with 3x the free ram of the Storm. Best of all it does not leak ram like that terrible device did.

How's that? Time for me to get back to Braveheart. Oh, I typed this whole thing out on the Tour using Bolt browser.

More Storm trolling. *yawn*

 

[boomhower]

Congrats. The Tour is my first BB and I am loving it as well. Opera Mini is my favorite browser by far. I use Bolt every now and again for sites that don't play will with OM but that is pretty rare. OM is vastly superior for cruising forums.

For email I just set up imap and BIS and called it a day. Can't access stored emails but being able to delete from the server from the phone is a Godsend. I never could get that working on my WM phones. You could probably get stored email using the gmail app.

For free apps, Viigo is a decent RSS ready. Poynt is good for local lookups. There is a nice speedtest app but I can't recall the name off the top of my head. Quickpull is a must have, it does a reset of your phone without needing to pull the batter, very handy. Berryscanner is a fun app to play with, it is a police scanner app.

 

[roguerower]

So an update....

I FUCKING LOVE THIS THING!!!!

My typing is steadily improving and i was really suprised how easy it was for my thumbs to get used it (i've never been a fast texter). Installed Viigo, Google Mobile, and Pandora. Will try berryscanner and quickpull. Deleted iskoop when I found out it wasn't free. As we speak i'm at work listening to pandora with headphones and sending emails to my family when they pop up. decided to ditch gmail app and just use default email. It works very easily now that I've figured it out.

I'm hooked, and look forward to really getting used to this thing. If I popped a big enough SD card this thing could replace my Ipod nano as default media player. How's the video playback quality?

 

[DivideBYZero]

Video is good, just get a decent endoder app that does the correct resolution, 480 x 360.

 

[DivideBYZero]

Here is a link to a great thread @ CrackBerry that covers video conversion:

http://forums.crackberry.com/f...onversion-howto-99653/

 

[boomhower]

There are a bunch of ways to encode for it with some BB specific apps but I always go back to old faithful, handbrake.