BlackBerry Tour Hits Verizon, Sprint in July

According to a promotional graphic posted on popular gadget blog Boy Genius Report, Verizon Wireless is planning to release the BlackBerry Tour on July 12. If that's the case, Verizon will be the first to hit the market with the awaited BlackBerry Tour, beating out Canadian carrier Telus' street date of July 15.

The same advertisement indicates pricing for the 3G BlackBerry Tour will start at $199.99 from Verizon.

Just eight days after the Tour launches on Verizon, Sprint is expected to release its version of the awaited smartphone.

According to blog Inside Sprint Now, the BlackBerry Tour is expected to be available on Sprint's 3G network come July 20. While Sprint hasn't confirmed the date, it's expected to run the same price as Verizon's Tour, $199.99.

Earlier this month, RIM officially unveiled the BlackBerry Tour 9630, a 3G world smartphone that promises connectivity around the globe, offering support for CDMA in North America and UMTS/HSPA networks abroad. It supports 3G EV-DO Rev A. networks in North America and the 3G UMTS/HSPA and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks overseas.

RIM said the Tour will hit both Verizon and Sprint this summer, but did not offer exact dates.

The BlackBerry Tour 9630 takes design queues from two popular BlackBerry smartphones, the Curve and the Bold. Aimed at high-end users, the Tour features a black finish with chrome highlights in a sleek 112mm x 62mm x 14.2mm frame and weighs 130 grams. The Tour features a full QWERTY keyboard with chrome frets and sculpted keys and a 2.44-inch 480 x 360 resolution display.

Additional features include a 3.2-megapixel camera with flash, variable zoom, image stabilization, autofocus and video recording; a full HTML Web browser with support for streaming audio and video; an advanced media player for videos, pictures and music and a 3.5mm stereo headset jack and Bluetooth Stereo Audio Profile support.

The BlackBerry Tour also packs in 256 MB of Flash memory and offers expandable memory via a hot-swappable microSD/SDHC memory card slot to support up to 16 GB now and 32-GB cards in the future. It houses a removable and rechargeable 1400 mAhr battery offering five hours of talk time and 14 days of standby time.

BlackBerry added that the built-in GPS in the Tour will support geotagging, BlackBerry Maps and other location-based applications and services, while BlackBerry Media Sync will let users sync music from iTunes and Windows Media Player with their smartphones.

Other features include voice-activated dialing, enhanced background noise cancellation, low-distortion speakerphone and Bluetooth 2.0 support; preloaded DataViz Documents to Go, which lets users view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on the handset; and mobile access to Facebook, MySpace and Flickr, along with instant messaging services like BlackBerry Messenger, Yahoo IM, AIM, Google Talk and Windows Live Messenger. Support for BlackBerry Internet Service also lets users access up to 10 supported personal or corporate e-mail accounts, including most popular consumer accounts.