Blackberry Smart Phone 9630 - Bold & Beautiful

  blackberry 8830 Mobile Phones

Although India now has over millions of CDMA subscribers, yet these subscribers never had much of a choice when it came to high-end Smart Phones. Outdated versions of Windows Mobile smartphones have ruled the roost for a long time, till Reliance Communications (R-Com) has launched Blackberry services in Sept 2007, and with it, the Blackberry 8830 World Edition Smartphone.

Let us consider the new Blackberry Tour 9630, the spiritual successor to the 8830 World Edition. This is a Hybrid phone that works on both CDMA and GSM networks and it is capable of roaming across the world, on any kind of network. Hence the name is Tour. This gadget also comes equipped with 3G on both CDMA (EVDO), and GSM (UMTS/HSPA), so the data speeds should be pretty good once 3G becomes widely available in India.

The Blackberry Tour 9630 is not a Dual SIM phone. This phone will be powered by a hybrid SIM card from Reliance Communication which is the exclusive retailer of the device in India.

The screen of this widget is attractive, sharp, and very easy to read in daylight as well as dark due to the auto light sensor. It runs the 4.7.x BlackBerry operating system, which features many improvements over the previous generation.

As far as form factor goes, it’s a BlackBerry 8900-size shell, with a BlackBerry Bold-like keyboard. The smaller size is obviously a major advantage, as the Bold can be quite a bother to carry, but cramming a Bold-style keyboard isn’t really the best thing for this form factor. It does not make for as a smooth a typing experience as the standard small keyboard on the Blackberry Curve or Blackberry 8900.

Feature-wise, A-GPS is included in the gadget, so you can easily run Google Maps, or for that matter, any other mapping / navigation software (MapMyIndia has navigation Software for BlackBerry phones). On the flip side, when it comes to connectivity, this phone lacks Wi-Fi support, which is very disappointing. Also, the Tour still uses the “Pearl”, the infamous Blackberry trackball that tends to get jammed with prolonged use.

The Blackberry Tour’s battery life also didn’t seem to be on par with its GSM brethren (about 3 hours of talk time and a day and a half of standby in our test).

Despite the bad parts, the Tour is still the best CDMA phone money can buy today.  Firstly, it is too expensive (Rs 27,990) for a phone with so few features. Secondly, the Blackberry Tour 9630 was launched in July 2009 in the US, and it has taken six months to get to India. In today’s smartphone market, so much changes in six months, that there are already reports of an updated Tour in the pipeline, with OS 5.0, Wi-Fi, and the Optical Trackpad.


If you’re searching for a good CDMA phone, and not necessarily a world roamer, you need to wait a few months, and the Curve 8530 should launch in India. This mobile phone has Wi-Fi, GPS, OS 5.0, does multimedia pretty well, and has that fancy Optical Trackpad as well (and should be priced around Rs 16-17,000).

More than any other factor, this phone suffers from poor launch timing. Blackberry should have launched the Tour six months earlier.