The recently announced Research In Motion (RIM) BlackBerry Tour 9630 smartphone now has official release dates, with the phone scheduled to make its debut on the Sprint Nextel and Verizon Wireless phone networks on July 12.
It will be available on Sprint for $200 -- after $50 instant rebate and $100 mail-in-rebate -- and will, of course, require the typical two-year service agreement.
Verizon will also sell the Tour on July 12, but other details about the phone haven't been released. Current Verizon subscribers can expect to pay around $200 for the phone, after $70 MIR, with the company expected to make an announcement later this week.
The BlackBerry Curve and Bold, two of RIM's most recent and popular smartphones, have racked up sales, and the Tour is just a modest upgrade to both of these phones. It's a world phone aimed both at business people who travel and others who have trips planned for outside of North America.
The Tour is a 3G EV-DO phone when used in the United States, and has EDGE/GPRS/GSM support when it's taken overseas. It also features a built-in QWERTY keyboard, MP3 player support, 256MB integrated memory, and Bluetooth 2.0 support. The phone ships without a built-in camera, but RIM is offering a Tour version that has a 3.2-megapixel camera.
The decision to ship two different models -- one with a camera, and one without -- makes sense, as many government buildings and other locations have rules prohibiting cameras, which has been a growing problem since most mobile phones now ship with cameras.
