Research in Motion (RIM) shares jumped nearly 3% this morning on news of the Blackberry Tour 9630 launch.
With hopes of luring customers away from competitors such as the iPhone and the Nokia N97 , the Blackberry Tour is feature heavy and sports a sleek, light design. Blackberry also has “BlackBerry App World™,” but compared to the iPhone apps, they just seem… embarrassing. Sorry, Blackberry.
Features don’t seem too different from previous offerings on the Curve and Bold series. The Tour boasts a 3.2 megapixel camera and 256MB flash memory (expandable to 16MB.) Video recording is also supported with the purchase of a MicroSD card. Talk time clocks in at about 5 hours, with up to two weeks of standby time. The Tour supports 3G EV-DO Rev. A networks in North America and 3G UMTS/HSPA and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks outside the states. The Tour has no support for Wi-Fi.
RIM is expecting to move 400-600,000 units through the end of August- but the iPhone 3G sold over a million units in three days last summer. The Tour (also known as Blackberry Niagara) is expected to launch through Verizon and Sprint, priced at $199 with a two-year contract.
