This Week in Phones #3 - Quick Look of BlackBerry Tour

Recently I migrated from AT&T to Sprint, mainly for coverage reasons. Upon switching, I picked up the BlackBerry Tour. This is my first smartphone, and I wanted to give my readers just a quick overview of the phone and its specs.

First off, the phone I have is running on Sprint’s network. If you’re on Verizon and want this phone, there is a Verizon counterpart. Both are the same price and have the same feature set. The phone itself has 256MB of ram, and comes with a 1GB microSD card (but no adapter). The SD card is located behind the battery door which is a little inconvenient, but not a big deal.

The phone does have a full QWERTY keyboard and BB’s legendary trackball, which helps you navigate screen items easier. The display is 480x360, which looks very good when brightness is turned all the way up, but I recommend turning it down to about 10, just to conserve battery life. The phone does have a 3.2 megapixel camera, which does take good pictures.

The phone comes preloaded with a few social networking apps such as Facebook and Flickr. It also comes with your typical productivity apps (Word to Go, Excel to Go and PowerPoint to go)

So in conclusion, that has been a brief overview of the BlackBerry Tour for Sprint. A full review will be coming in about 1 1/2 to 2 weeks, so keep a look out for that.

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02UK is dropping the Price

Phone carrier 02 in the UK is dropping the price of their iPhone tariffs as they were recently taken away from the exclusivity of being the only one iPhone carrier in the UK. 

02 now offers the iPhone on a £25 per month for 24 months, which includes 100 voice minutes, unlimited texts and 3G data. This is a really good option for light phone users who are wanting to jump on the iPhone product line however, as the iPhone is really focused on the business market, 100 voice minutes isn't really a good option for those but are only allocated at a consumer level.

In comparison, 3UK offers a HTC Hero Android phone for £25 per month for 24 months, that includes 500 voice minutes, unlimited texts and 3G data and Vodafone UK is offering a Blackberry Curve (8520) £25 per month for 24 months with 300 voice minutes, unlimited texts and unlimited data, unknown if 3G or not. 

C'mon 02, you were the exclusive carrier for the iPhone back in the day but more networks are getting similar phones and even though the phones are different, the contract seems to contain more for the same value.

Palm is Coming to AT&T

Recently, Palm announced that AT&T customers will have a new smartphone to chose from, announcing that the Palm Pre Plus and the Pixi Plus will be coming to the AT&T network. This is in light of Palm announcing a loss in profit of $22M. Having sold less phones than the pervious quarter, Palm is hoping that expanding their smartphone line to more than 80M AT&T subscribers will boost profits.

 Many bloggers have speculated wondering why people would consider coming to AT&T as opposed to Verizon Wireless or Sprint for these phones. I don’t think this is a case of trying to lure new customers, I think this is a case of offering existing customers a new smartphone. Yes, I’m sure that people are more keen on moving to Verizon, but for customers who are set on AT&T, it just expands the variety of smart phones available to them.

 Based on prices of other carriers, Palm has stated that the Pre Plus will be priced at $149 after rebates with a 2-year contract, and the Pixi Plus will be priced reasonably lower at $49 after rebates and a 2-year contract, which is priced competitively with other smart phones that AT&T offers such as the iPhone and BlackBerry. Palm has not yet released a launch date of this merge, but has said that it will be showing the two phones at CTIA working on AT&T’s network.

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