Rediscovering my blackberry with the new Tour

After having been an iPhone fan and user for so long, I cheated Apple and made a Palm Pre my main phone for about a month. While I still enjoy and use daily my iPhone 3GS I have given up using the Palm Pre until the OS and the major apps such as the browser become faster.

I decided to give a try to the new Blackberry Tour which comes from Sprint with their unique and awesome all you can eat international unlimited data plan. If you travel, it is golden. I have yet to tether the Tour to my Mac and I will be in heaven, online anywhere in the world for a flat fee.

The Tour is between a curve and a bold in size. It is small enough while giving you a very good keyboard. I cannot praise more the blackberry keyboard, I type with two thumbs very fast on it without having to look at the keyboard and neither the Pre nor the iPhone give me that. I type reasonably fast on the iPhone in landscape mode now but not as fast as on the Tour.

I like the keyboard so much that I setup my Typepad post by email then tweet the post so that I start writing again longer posts from the Blackberry. We will see if that habit sticks again, I would love to get into some more serious blogging again and the Tour helps.

The browser isn't clearly as good as on the iPhone, far from it, but I was surprised in a good way by the progress made by RIM in that space, it's ok to surf the web, but not awesome.

Apps! I instantly downloaded gmail and it is amazing on the BB, especially the keyboard shortcuts and you do not miss much of the web experience.

Downloaded the blackberry appstore and the crackberry appstore, you can feel there is a growing activity in BB apps. Buying one isn't as smooth as in the appstore but both stores provide a good experience, I have not browsed enough yet to judge the quality of the apps. I installed Evernote which is useful but a bit disappointing since you cannot access your notes offline and edit them, but I am sure they will get there.

Multitasking has been a Blackberry plus for years, as well as push email. I also like the video and pic camera on the Tour but I still have to test its quality.

I really feel like having both the iphone for browsing and the apps, and the blackberry for typing fast and the worldwide data plan in my pockets, so much for traveling light!