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Innovation

Tale of two loaded cell phones

Cell phones are so stuffed with features, it is impossible for the consumer to fully evaluate them in a phone store. The decision is based on looks and feel along with how much you cave in to sales pressure in crowded phone stores. by John Dodge
Written by John Dodge, Contributor

Cell phones are so stuffed with features, it is impossible for the consumer to fully evaluate them in a phone store. The decision is usually based on look and feel along with how much the consumer caves to sales pressure in crowded phone stores.

The Blackberry Tour 9360 Smartphone and LG enV3 are no exceptions and are crammed with features. Verizon sent me both to evaluate and I have to return them. So I'll evaluate as far as I got. Consider that it's  taken me months to master my Blackberry Curve and it's great to discover a useful feature - I just started using the phone's GPS feature!

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Blackberry Tour is on the left, enV3 "texting animal" on the right.

Both the Tour and enV3 are very competent and possess real but different strengths. The enV3 is a texting animal. The Blackberry, which is more suited to what I do, is better at email and web surfing. I am more familiar with the Tour given it's the logical step up from my trusty Blackberry Curve. You can get full reviews at CNet for both the Tour and enV3.

With the enV3, the calling and texting menu are the first thing you see when you fire it up and keyboard thumb-  driven keyboard is where 20-somethings and teenagers hang out for much of their lives. My college senior son upgraded to enV2 several months ago and liked it. As I recall, he paid (or we) paid $70 with another two-year commitment. The enV3 goes for $80 including rebate with a two-year service commitment.

The enV3 is a flip phone with dialing pad on the phone front when closed. Open it and out comes the keyboard and 1.56 inch display. The enV3 has a daunting number of features including GPS, a 3.2 megapixel camera, instant messaging and a media center where you can get movie showtimes. That was sort of cool and worked the second time I tried it for my local theater.

I found email hard to use and configure. The phone didn't allow me to configure my Gmail, which was not among the options listing email systems. And when you hit the email configuration icon, it gives you ambiguous choices like "Mobile Email" and Mobile Web Mail." We're not born knowing the difference.

I found access to web buried under several menus and it always seem to first take me to an unwanted  Verizon web site, but I finally managed to get to a tiny version of the Google home page. Web browsing on a cell phone is slow and something less than on a laptop. As I said, it takes a while to master such features.

I didn't get as much time with the Tour because it apparently died on me. It won't turn on even though it seemingly charged via a USB cable to my computer (the previous reviewer kept the power supply!). It could be something I am doing wrong, but I doubt it. I suspect a battery problem although I could have inadvertantly turned on some security setting that locked down the phone. I checked the standby setting which is activated by the mute button, but that did not appear to be the problem.

I did have chance to use it though and love the high resolution display which makes the one in the Curve appear cartoon-ish. It also has a great advanced voicemail feature which listed who sent the messages. GSM allows it to be used overseas, something  my Curve can't do. That's a fraction of the features. But at $150 if I can even get the Verizon discount, I'll keep my Curve for a while longer which has held up well against my less than gentle treatment. The next step is to use as a modem for mobile broadband.

I've had several Blackberries over the years and they have all been reliable so I'll chaulk my Tour's unresponsiveness up as an anomaly. Fact is if this happened to you, Verizon would likely replace it under warranty.

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This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com

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