Tuesday, July 14, 2009

My first day with the BlackBerry Tour...I think I'm in love

I was able to get a BlackBerry Tour in from Verizon today and all the hype about the device proved to be true. I have to say that so far, this is the fastest, brightest and all around awesome-est device RIM has put out, at least in the States. The 3.1 MP camera alone is worth the cost of admission in my opinion. The device comes loaded with the 4.7 OS, which is very reminiscent of the OS that was on the Storm. The 480x360x65K color screen is brilliant! Of course, there is one thing missing in this device. No wifi. Full specs on the device can be found on RIM's website, of course.
A word of "warning" though for BES Admins. I'm currently running BES 4.1.6.39 on my BlackBerry server. When I set up the Tour this afternoon, web surfing and mail flow was a little wonky. I got to wondering if there was an issue between running the new OS and the "older" server. But then I remembered one key thing. When a new device is released from RIM, they generate new device.xml and vendor.xml files that need loaded on your BES server. These files contain information about the device that your BES server needs to know. In the BlackBerry Manager today, my device was showing up under the Configuration Status as "Device Not Supported"
The steps to update the server with new information are simple:
1. Go here and follow the instructions.
2. After following those steps, and in a command prompt, I also went to \Program Files\Common Files\Research in Motion\AppLoader and ran the command:
loader /index
Once I did that and did the "Update Configuation Check Status" for my device, it changed to OK and everything started working correctly. The only "weird" thing though is under Network in BlackBerry Manager, the device shows up as Vodaphone and not Verizon. Not a big deal, but just something else to keep in mind.
So all in all, this device is worth the money. I'm sure there's something I'll find that I won't necessarily like, but to me it is the best device I've seen them put out.

1 comment:

TexasSwede said...

Do I understand the specs correctly as the Tour is pretty much identical to the Bold, with the exception of a 3.2MP camera instead of 2.0MP, and without wifi?
The display sounds like the same and a quick look at the specs indicate that most other things are identical.
I am very happy with my Bold, so I can imagine you are very satisfied with your Tour.