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.
{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2009\/06\/30\/199-blackberry-tour-hits-verizon-july-12th-pre-orders-start-now\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_d44731b516ba7788db60e8dc101a1a72","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}