Thread: 8830 to Tour

I have a Sprint 8830, I expect my company will let me upgrade to the Tour soon.
Can anyone comment on the differences (improvements) in these areas:

1) Signal coverage

I spend a bunch of time in fringe areas and roaming on VZW. If I leave the Mobile Network connection on all night my battery will run down due to the poor signal in that part of my house.

2) Speed

If I turn on location tracking on Google Maps, the 8830 gets very sluggish.
Will web pages load faster when I'm in EVDO coverage?
I also find apps with lots of data (SplashID with 500+ entries) are slow.

3) Keyboard, trackball usablilty

I like the 8830's keyboard better than my wife's 8330 Curve.

4) Battery life


Thanks.

Jeff

I made this switch a few months ago.. I'll try to answer the best I can.

1. I am on Verizon and have not noticed any difference in my signal coverage from the 8830 to Tour. If anything, it's slightly better.

2. Speed is like night and day. The tour has very little lag in it, it runs exceptionally fast.

3. The keyboard on the tour is a little bit smaller, it took me a few days to get used to. However I like the trackball on the Tour better, it doesn't feel as flimsy. Feels more solid.

4. I think the battery life on the 8830 was a little bit better, but it's been so long that I don't remember anymore. I typically charge my tour every night when I go to sleep, so I don't have any battery issues.

The tour is an outstanding phone, highly recommend it.

Hope this helps.

I also made the same switch the day the Tour came out.

Here's the thing: the Tour is an infinitely better phone, BUT a huge part of it is upgrading the OS. The factory OS (4.7 something) just isn't very good. Upgrading it to 5.0.0.230 makes all the difference in the world.

As for your specific points:

1) Signal: my coverage was always good, and probably got marginally better with the Tour. Please remember, though, to update your roaming capabilities with the new phone.

2) Speed: geez, by the time I ditched my 8830, I was running it with the most current OS at the time, and had torn out every app that I didn't use. And then I turned on the Tour. Easily 4x as fast.

3) The keyboard is different; not better or worse, just different. Ultimately, though, I like it. Only potential problem that I encountered: I use a skin on my Tour, and only the Blackberry brand Tour skin is cut correctly to fit around the keys.

4) Battery life: very good. I charge my phone every night, but rarely if ever have i had to charge it mid-day. Also, this is with having 3-5 additional apps (google voice, tweetgenius, sensobi, etc.) running in the background.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the feedback. Now to convince IT that I need an upgrade...

I upgraded from an 8830 to a Tour (but I am on Sprint) a couple of months ago, so here's my experience

1) Signal coverage

Seems the same or maybe a bit better to me

2) Speed

Speed is definitely faster, both because the Tour supports EVDO revA (vs rev0 on the 8830), which is a bit faster, but more importanly, much lower latency. Even more improvement on overall perceived speed than the network, IMO, is the increase in CPU and RAM on the device (especially RAM). Browsing (although I think is still a pretty crappy experience on a Blackberry) is a HUGE improvement over the 8830. I assume that 4.7+ has improved the browser itself as well, but I'm not sure how much difference that makes. I can't stress how much of a better daily experience using the Tour is over the 8830. Gone are the days of daily (weekly if lucky) battery pulls to free up RAM.. Yes, it'll happen occasionally, but now it's more like monthly (still pretty ridiculous that RIM hasn't figured out a better method for memory management but at least it takes a *lot* longer to run out now). As for OS 5, I used it for a couple of weeks and it did seem a little nicer, but also a bit buggy (even on .230), so I reverted to 4.7 for now. Honestly, 5.0 seemed like a fairly minor upgrade to me, not even close to something that warrants a full version number change, but it is nicer.

3) Keyboard, trackball usablilty

I do think I liked the 8830 trackball a little better, but I may have one of the problematic earlier Tours, so I can't really say.

4) Battery life

Better for me, but not hugely.



Hope this helps!

I've had my Tour since Christmas Eve and can answer my own questions.

1) Signal

Much better than the 8830. I can make a call from my basement office w/o putting the phone on the window sill.

2) Speed

Much faster processor.

3) Keyboard, trackball.

I liked the 8830 keyboard better. But this one is better than my wife's 8330 Curve.

I often hit the buttons on the side of the trackball when trying to push the trackball. Poor design, trackpad version will be better.

4) Battery Life

Well, I can't leave Google Maps Lattitude running all the time. But the battery life is better. I only have problems with I spend time at the ski area all cell coverage is spotty.

I have not yet upgraded to 5.0, I might try the Alltel version if Sprint doesn't come out with their version by the time I have some cycles to do the upgrade.

What's nicest is not having to reboot all the time because I was out of memory. Now I only reboot when upgrading an app.

Thanks.

Jeff