HTC Eris or Blackberry Tour?

M

Mojo_Puppy

New member
I need a smartphone mainly for e-mail (2 accounts- gmail & verizon.net), some web browsing, taking a good pic and adding it to my webpage, and some texting. Most importantly, it must be a good telephone with clear sound both ways. The phone will be in my pants pocket all day, every day so it must be comfortable. What do you think? Would you recommend something besides these two?
 
I think either one will suit you for this. I can guarantee you a better browser on the eris, and I think that one will be a more comfortable device to live in the pocket, it's quite small. So your last deciding factor is how much you want keys. My friend has the eris and he can't stop praising the virtual keyboard, and camera. some people feel they do better having physical keys though
 
i was in the same decision tree. Coming from an iphone i was used to the virtual keyboard. Eris' was a bit more difficult but there is an after market application for it called better keyboard which is aobut the same as the iphone in terms of speed.

I am about twice as fast on the virtual as i was on my bberry curve.

Other things to think about: Berry battery life will be better (i think) and you have to fix the stupis SMS bug in the eris.

I am happy so far with the eris because size was more of a factor to me than batter life. I also like the soft phone aspect a bit better than non touch screens (4-6k minutes/month in phone usage).

Eris also has an annoying bluetoothe issue requiring repairing of headsets which is supposed to be fixed in december
 
The typing experience on the Blackberry Tour is the best I've tried, and way better than any virtual keyboard. For touchscreen phones I have had an HTC Touch Diamond, a Nokia 5530 and iPod Touch which has the same keyboard as the iPhone. All HTC keyboards are similar to the one on the Diamond. I like the HTC keyboard more than the Apple's, but never tried it on a capacitive screen like on the Eris. The Diamond uses a resistive screen. The Tour's keyboard is better than any Curve, matches or surpasses even the Bold.

Browsing experience would favor the Eris with its larger screen. The browser on the Tour isn't fast, but if you installed Opera Mini 5 on the Tour like I do, it will browse well. The Tour's screen is fantastic for its brilliance and sharpness.

The weakpoint of the Tour is the trackball, and of course, keys are mechanical. Since the phone has all these mechanical parts there will be more failure points than a touchscreen phone which is inherently more robust unless you drop it to the floor and crack the screen.

I feel that the Eris would be more comfortable on your pants. A phone with buttons should be on a holster, which the Tour provides included, like something similar to Obama uses with his Blackberry.
 
I am not biased, but after using both devices, I would go with the Tour for what you need. The browsing is good enough, and if you load another browser as mentioned above, it will be fine. The camera takes great pictures, and the Tour, as all BlackBerry devices are, handle email extremely well, especially multiple accounts. The Eris does not from my experience, with only 1 Gmail account being true push. The battery on the Tour destroys the Eris, although it does lack wifi.
 
Just to let people know there is Opera Mini 5 for the Blackberry. For the Tour, you need to load the one that says for the OS 4.2 or OS 4.3, not the OS 4.7 for the Storm, although the Tour does use OS 4.7 as well. It works perfectly well with the Blackberry, allows even cut and paste outside of the browser (Opera Mini 5 for Symbian only allows cut and paste within the app itself). The high resolution of the Tour's screen makes a perfect fit for Opera Mini 5 for fast browsing.
 
I'd say the Eris wins running away. Android's web browser runs circles around BB's, from youtube and vimeo videos, file browser for downloading files off the web, voice searching, and multi touch on a larger screen. Its not even a fair comparison to be honest. You can push your gmail, google contacts, youtube, and calendar just by signing into your gmail account on your phone, and setup exchange to handle your VZW.net account. The phone is also small, compact, and very lightweight.
 
I went into best buy for something else and checked out the new curve vs. tour. I think i would think about the curve rather than the tour. Very compact and pocektable.
 
The new Curve has a smaller screen, a cheaper feel, no flash for the camera, but does have wifi. In hand, the Curve felt really cheap, not like it should. The Tour is pretty solid on the other hand, but lacks wifi.
 
The new Curve has nearly the same size of screen as the Tour actually but the resolution is much lower, so its not as sharp or as bright. The Tour's screen is one of the clearest and sharpest I have seen on a phone so much that even the tiniest fonts are discernible.

I do feel the new Curves feel even cheaper than the old 83XX ones, and if for the same price, the Droid Eris is a better buy, except for the battery life.
 
I checked out all 3 the last few weeks. Couldn't make up my mind. I swear I was in the verizon store more than I was home....

The tour is nice, great screen, but small. Trackball not so much. Didn't care for it.

The Curve 2 as it's named seems like a great little device. The trackpad was fantastic. The screen not so much. Actually, the screen size is slightly bigger than the Tour's. The screen resolution is not up to par with the Tour's. It's quite noticeable to me.

I picked up the Eris for a trial run. The touch screen is great. Size-wise it's small enough to put in your pocket, but big enough to actually see. Battery-wise I don't know yet.

In the end, I decided I had enough of these 2.4" screens. If I'm gonna spend 12-14 hours a day with my phone I want a screen that doesn't give me a headache.
 
It looks like you have decided whether to be a browser or a typer. If you're a browser, go with the phone with the bigger screen. If you're a typer, physical keyboard wins everytime.

When people are deciding on their smartphones, they have to ask themselves:

Am I a Browser?

or

Am I a Typer?
 
I don't agree with that. My son who is in his 3rd year of college can type almost twice as fast on his iPhone as I can on my E71. And I've seen some of these younger kids that are blazingly fast on virtual keypads.

I'm obviously not sure of your age, but for me I can adapt to typing slightly slower. I can no longer adapt to a smaller screen.
 
Look, I got an iPod Touch. I often tweet from it. In fact, I got over 22k tweets, 99% from various hand held devices, including iPod Touch.

I know for a fact that the virtual keyboards, its way too easy to make a mistake. To make a capital, you need to shift down, then press the key. To type numbers, I have to switch the ABC keyboard to the 123 keyboard.

I now have a Blackberry Tour. I am moving text faster than on my iPod Touch. I know, I can feel it. Less mistakes. To get a capital, I just merely press on the key longer. To get numbers, I press down on the alt key, then type on the designated keys to get the numbers with another fighter. I also get symbols that way. Nokia has a funny caps-underlining mode change on the key system that I feel particularly gets in the way of the typing. Not as intuitive as Blackberry, which gets the cap by pressing the key down a little longer. To get numbers and symbols on the Apple virtual keyboard, again, a mode change to change the keyboard. Not as efficient as pressing alt in one thumb, and the appropriate key on the other like you do on the BB.

To move cursor to edit text, finger tip isn't proving to be as precise as landing the cursor between two letters in the screen. I often have to delete the entire word and rewrite the whole word again since its faster. On the trackball, merely scroll the pointer to the precise space between the two characters.
 
Especially when you can cheat with the trackball. Realize that you made a mistake towards the beginning? Scroll all the way up, even out of the message, and then back down, and the cursor goes to the beginning. Same with the end. Scroll down, and then back up, and it goes to the end. You don't get that kind of stuff on a virtual keyboard. :D
 
Back
Top