Its been a solid 5 months or so with what until very recently was being called the “best Blackberry yet”. Now the new Curve, Bold and Storm2 have come out, with a new Pearl on the way. Oh.. and.. the Tour2. Yeah, that’s right.. good old RIM is pulling an Apple on us early adopters! Why, one might ask? Likely because the Tour(1) is NOT the best BB ever. In fact.. Its kinda crappy and I’m pretty fed up with it.

Sure, it looks great, takes very good pictures, and has an amazing display.. but my Tour is becoming increasingly unstable and laggy. Both of these situations have a simple fix – reboot – which sadly takes 7+ minutes on the device. Yeah – SEVEN minutes – sometimes creeping up to TEN. Its absolutely unbelievable, considering how “powerful” it is supposed to be – lots of memory and a fast processor – yet it can’t load its own OS nearly as fast as Blackberries with much lesser stats? Huh? My old Pearl (see the earliest posts) could out-boot the Tour by 5 minutes, easily.

Stability wise, its great, as long as I don’t use any 3rd party apps. The latest version of Facebook has a nice bug that literally reboots the device when I exit the app. What? I guess we’ll call that “memory cleaning” or something. Ridic. Running Google Maps works quite well.. as long as you have alot of time. My lovely Tour has a little hourglass problem.. where nearly everytime I try to USE Gmaps, it loads quickly, then hangs for a solid 30 seconds. The phone is completely unusable during this period. And it likely will repeat this behavior several times during the Gmaps session.

Signal quality is abysmal. I am still dropping out of 1XEV constantly, down to 1X, and sometimes losing signal altogether. Its not Verizon’s issue, as I’ve mentioned before – its this goddamn phone. Kim’s old Curve is still a champ at holding a signal. Fortunately this signal crap does not drop too many calls.. but it still does now and then – though not as many as the good old iPhone.

It’s been said, since this phone came out, that the new “OS5.0″ would be coming out “soon”. 5 months later, its still not out, thanks to Verizon.. however there are some leaks out there. I hope I hope I hope the new OS will fix the issues I list above.. namely the booting and signal quality issues. I suspect any “fresh install” of an OS will fix some of the instabilities .. much like any device. I am not banking on the new OS to come out anytime soon, however – nor do I really expect it to actually fix the issues. I am almost certain, in fact – especially since the Tour2 is coming out (with features like Wifi, trackpad and a truthfully faster processor). If the Tour(1) were so great – would there be any need to build a better version of it immediately after release? Nope.

So.. as I sort of suspected some time ago.. the Tour is simply my “right now” phone. Thinking about day-to-day frustration, it is still less (but not much less!) infuriating than my iPhone experience- probably because the camera is relatively awesome, and it still does a great job at email.

Now that Motorola released the Droid, and  Google has its Nexus One out (soon to be on Verizon).. I’m starting to get more interested in Android – but I am going to wait it out a bit longer.