After a few years of carrying around a Palm Treo and having nothing but service problems, I had just about sworn off all smart phones forever.

I had eyed the Blackberry Curves for a while, but had heard that while they were tremendous devices, the battery life left a lot to be desired.

So, I waited, and this summer they introduced the Blackberry Tour. The initial reviews had a common theme:they got the battery longevity right this time. So, I bought one.

As a Verizon Wireless customer for over 9 years, I think very highly of the network and the service techs in my local area. I purchased the phone at the Johns Creek, GA store. My “education” really was nothing more than the salesperson telling me about the e-mail capabilities of the device-that it can handle up to 10 email accounts.

Pros of the device:

Email accounts-extremely simple to set up and configure. You have the ability to set up 10 emails. I personally have 6 set up on the device. The ability to manage all of the emails from one central “message icon” is tremendous. It is the first icon on the Blackberry screen. I love this feature.

Keypad -having used an Apple iPhone for business, I can state that touch screen typing, at least for some of us, is simply not fun nor accurate. The Blackberry Tour’s key advantage is, well, the keys. I like typing on the keypad where I can feel the buttons and I find it is far more accurate than touch screen typing. It is for this reason that I never seriously considered the Blackberry Storm.

Applications-having used the iPhone, I am familiar with the apps that can be used and was pleasantly surprised to find a nice array of free applications available to Blackberry users. Among the applications that I use are Pandora Radio, Flickr, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Google Sync (for syncing contacts as a backup), one of the many weather apps, Viigo (an RSS feeder for news-my kids like when I read them “Reuters Oddly Enough” which is a “news of the weird”), Xenozu (a Youtube player), My Verizon, and a financial app for the place which still has what is left of my 401K.

Camera-the device can come with a camera (other models do not) and the one that comes with the Blackberry Tour is a 3.2 mega-pixel camera. It takes nice pictures and also comes with a flash. I recently used it at a local concert I attended (very dark) and it took excellent video as well. When I uploaded it to my computer, it was obvious that this is a great media device.

Device Manager- the Tour comes with simple to use software that you load on your PC and it allows easy movement of media to and from the device. I like to backup the data every few days, as I’ve learned my lesson about not backing up from a past bad experience.

Cons:
Screen Size-I’ll admit it: I got spoiled by the iPhone and it’s large, media-friendly screen. There is simply no competing with the size of the iPhone’s screen, so this is an obvious disadvantage.

That is really the only thing I can think of that I would change about the Tour. I would highly recommend it to any and all.