Software
Media
I’ve found video and music playback considerably better on the Tour than on previous BlackBerrys. Music now has a cool fade-in and fade-out between tracks, and I found that some videos that were just plain choppy on the Bold actually run smooth as butter on the Tour without any dinking around with mobile optimization. Still, there are a bunch of files that still won’t play, so unless your video podcasts come in a low-fi version, don’t count on the BlackBerry’s native media player to necessarily handle all of your needs.
The app for the 3.2 megapixel camera was polished up a little bit – now switching zoom levels has a smooth transition rather than choppy, direct cuts. There’s also a new “Image Stablization” option whose finer points I haven’t been able to discriminate. Here are two pictures comparing the feature turned on and off, so decide for yourself. Autofocus and geotagging are also part of the package, as usual. Detailed tuning between zoom levels and more extensive white balance/exposure settings would be nice, but beggers can’t be chosers. BlackBerry is also now recognized as a portable media player by Windows, allowing for easy two-way transfer pictures, video, and music, without having to deal with the silly Roxio media manager app bundled with Desktop Manager.
As I mentioned earlier, the top-mounted mute button causes some issues with accidental activation, but conversely, I find sometimes when I want to actually unmute, it goes into standby instead (normally activated by a long press). Maybe they just lowered the press duration threshold for going into standby, or there’s an OS lag, but it’s happened on more than one occasion.
The external speaker is now solely on the left side, rather than centred as before. Practically, it works well when you’re pointing the audio in a specific direction (speakerphone calls come to mind), but sounds very awkward when it comes to music. The Bold continues to rock my socks when it comes to external speaker quality.