Tour – Awesome – kinda, sorta.

We’ve got some issues here. I love the Tour – alot. The speed, camera, the multitasking, GPS, 3G, keys, rubbery grip, and incredible screen.. however all is not well.

My GPS craps out. Alot. So much that nearly every time I want to use it (for awesome apps like GPSlogger), I have to reboot the phone to get the GPS chip to wake up. Not cool. It takes ages to reboot, too – like 7 minutes or more. My old Pearl did it in half the time..

Further GPS crap – even when it is working.. it occasionally reports INSANE data. You can see it in action in these images.. two are from a round of golf I logged, where I apparently broke the sound barrier, and another is from a run – where I broke 80mph on foot. Right.

To ice this cake, the signal reception has issues as well. I can be sitting on the couch here and watch the signal drop from full 1XEV to no bars, to just 1X (which I think is like ATT Edge vs 3G).. then lose data connectivity altogether.. then it bounces right back. Meanwhile, Kim’s Curve, also on VZW, right next to my phone, maintains a strong signal consistently.  WTF, RIM?

So this Tour is over – going to swap for a new one at the VZW store. And apparently, the newer “batches” of Tours are much better built, so say other folks on the internets. So I’ve got that going for me, which is nice. We’ll see. So far I am not happy – at all – about these shortcomings.

Update.. timed a reboot: 6.5 minutes before it was “awake” and then almost another minute before it was useable. and… it is on 1X vs 1XEV – unreal. I’ve had enough of this. And today’s lesson for CDMA networks:
1X: Connected to the cellular network on 1xRTT as well as connected to RIM’s servers
1XEV: Connected to the cellular network on EVDO as well as connected to RIM’s servers

So compared to GSM, 1X is like EDGE, 1XEV is like 3G.

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2 Responses to Tour – Awesome – kinda, sorta.

  1. Doug says:

    7 minutes/??????????????????

  2. Matt Hult says:

    You spell the words “a lot”, like “alot”, a lot of the time.

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