$199 BlackBerry Tour Hits Verizon July 12th, Pre-Orders Start Now
While I planned to watch one Tour starting this weekend, another one lands in a few weeks. The BlackBerry Tour arrives in Verizon Wireless stores on July 12th and you won’t have to climb Col du Tormalet that day to get one. You can pre-order the Tour now for $199 with a 2-year agreement. It looks like a pre-order will bypass the pesky $70 mail-in rebate that store purchasers will deal with when paying $269.99.
Like the BlackBerry 8830, the Tour is a World Edition phone from Verizon, so it supports the U.S. 3G CDMA networks here at home but also works in over 220 countries abroad that use EDGE/GPRS/GSM and HDPA. As with all of the other BlackBerry devices, the Tour has that legendary, high-quality keyboard that ‘Berrys are known for. Here’s a quick recap of the other specs, which we learned about a few weeks back:
- 2.44″ display with 480 x 360 res
- 3.2-megapixel camera with flash, variable zoom, image stabilization, autofocus and video recording (only to a microSD card)
- Full HTML browser
- 3.5mm headset jack and support for stereo Bluetooth
- Built-in GPS for geo-tagging and BlackBerry Maps
- BlackBerry Media Sync
- Preloaded DataViz Documents to Go
- Support for the BlackBerry App World
- 1400 mAh battery for 5 hours of talk, 14 days of standby
Crackberry has discovered that the Tour is being offered in two versions by Verizon, with and without a camera. Both models cost the same and the option to bypass the camera is a welcome one for those whose companies forbid them.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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So if I am reading this correctly, the Tour could be unlocked and used on ATT with 3G service?
Never mind, re read it and found the answer to my question.
It’s a nice phone, but it’s not $199. If I sold you this phone for $10 but you have to pay me $500 tomorrow it’s not a $10 phone. Maybe you think I’m pedantic but if you report it this way it just encourages the anti-competitive phone/contract bundling strategies that we see because people don’t know what they are paying, rather than a free market where phones and contracts are separate.
A better price to report is net present cost, where the interest rate isn’t important over 2 years so it’s approximately $199+monthly contract price*24.