As I mentioned before, I have been playing around with my new Blackberry Tour.  I picked this thing up about a week ago and have been tinkering.  Before I complain I want to say that I do love this phone.  Part of the reason is that I am going from using a Pearl to a Tour.  The Pearl is a much smaller phone, which was part of the appeal for me.  A lot of people hated that SureType keypad that the Pearl uses.  Again, I had no problem adapting to that.  The browsing and messaging experience between the Pearl and Tour is like night and day!  The Tour is amazingly fast when surfing the net.  Having the larger screen definitely helps when viewing web pages that have a lot of information.  I am not the biggest fan of the web browser that ships on these phones though.  I haven’t yet installed Opera mini but I will probably get around to doing so pretty soon.  Having the full QWERTY keypad is also a huge help.  I use a lot of random words and nicknames when messaging my friends.  I also swear at them a lot.  I hated when SureType would assume I wanted to say “You are a ducking piece of shut” instead of the more obvious insult.  No matter how much you added your favourite curse words into your custom dictionary, it assumed the best of your language.  No need to worry about that with a full QWERTY keypad.  This has improved my cursing efficiency by 2000%!  Viewing emails and attachments is also a much better experience with the larger screen on this baby.  3rd party apps also display much better and are  more functional.  I use Google Maps, Poynt, MSN Messenger and Facebook.  All look sharp and work quickly on the 3G network.  This is where my complaining will start.  My problem is software related.  Google Maps cannot access the GPS unit in this phone because of a software issue.  Either RIM is going to have to address this with an update or Google will have to fix it with a specific version of maps for this 9630.  I know the GPS unit works fine because I have no problems with it in the native Blackberry Maps app.  This isn’t a HUGE issue because I am in the city and have a pretty accurate location by using cellular triangulation…but I still prefer Google to show my location within a few feet!  I have also noticed another little quirk that reared it’s head yesterday.  By default, all custom ringer settings for each contact show the tone set to a classic phone ring.  This is misleading because you may think you have set this custom ring tone.  There should be an option that says “profile default” or something like that.  By going into the sounds options you can see that you have no custom ringers set and you should probably manage them from this menu instead of the contacts menu.  The other day I had anyone calling who was in my address book have this old ring tone instead of the default…even though the unit confirmed I had no custom ringers set!  It drove me crazy.  A quick battery pull solved the issue but that certainly isn’t something I want to happen without me knowing.  Through my internetting I found other people having similar issues with the sound profiles.  This is something I hope RIM addresses with either an update or when the 5.0 OS is delivered and supported on the Tour.  Again, that is just me complaining.  Overall I absolutely love this phone.  The speed and messaging experience is totally worth any temporary glitches in software.  For added value, here is a video showing you how to unlock your Tour.

Tags: 9630, blackberry, custom ringtone issue, google maps cannot find location, gps problem, gps unavailable, problem, profile, review, rim, tour, unlock, user experience

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 10:59 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.