14 DAY TRIAL // Wireless carrier Sprint is reportedly preparing for the release of the BlackBerry Tour on its airwaves, and it won't be too long before the device is released, as July 12 is only this Sunday. Even so, it seems that the Tour is not the only phone from Research In Motion making its way to the operator's lineup, nor this model the only Tour flavor that will come to its subscribers.
According to some of the latest news on the Internet, Sprint is also prepping the launch of a BlackBerry Tour variant that would also include Wi-Fi capabilities, something that the current 9630 version totally lacks. “Sprint is embracing WiFi in all its major devices going forward,” is what the company's director of business product marketing, Jeff Clemow, has stated, reports FierceWireless.
The BlackBerry Tour 9630 will become available for purchase not only on Sprint this Sunday, but on Verizon as well, and will come with CDMA and GSM network frequency support. The price of the device, as many of you might already know, has been set at $199.99. While this handset, unlike other phones from RIM, does not include WLAN capabilities, it seems that a future version that solves this issue will also be offered to users, and Sprint will certainly have it, though Verizon hasn't commented on this yet.
But the Tour, either Wi-Fi-less or Wi-Fi capable, is not the only BlackBerry handset that Sprint intends to bring to the market in the near future. Some leaked materials that surfaced on the web have shown that the carrier is also ramping up for the release of two other RIM devices, namely Curve 8330 and Curve 8350i. Moreover, there is also an image that shows the colors the handsets will come with, and they should be “Inferno” for Curve 8330 and Red for Curve 8350i.
For the time being, however, there are no details on when the Curve phones will come to the carrier's offering, though some more pieces of information might surface on July 21, when the operator has a training session set to take off. It is also rather uncertain how much traction the 83xx series will see on the market after the Tour lands, though Sprint might very well surprise us with a new offer, so stay tuned to learn more on this.