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.