New 9930 user

I've used a Blackberry Tour for the past 18 months, as it was the phone we issue to our field based personnel. I felt it was a functional phone, very good on email, messaging, and phone calls, which was 90% of what I did with it. I always felt it was sort of a Chevy of phones, nothing special, but solid and reliable.

As part of a recent upgrade to our corporate wireless cards, Verizon upgraded our phones to the Bold 9650, if you call that an upgrade. The addition of wifi and OS6 was a decent upgrade, but it felt like a Tour with wifi, with few other additional features.

After having my phone for approximately a week, it started rebooting itself with no prompt. While traveling on business Monday afternoon, it rebooted about 10 times in a 90 minute period and I was missing calls. I went to the nearest Verizon store and the people there were very helpful and said they would swap out my phone.

A few minutes later they came back and said they did not have any 9650s (what a shock considering it's over a year old), so they were going to replace my 9650 with the 9930 at no additional charge. (It helps to be on a corporate account with 60 phones and 50 wireless cards).

When she brought out the 9930, I could tell immediately this was a significant upgrade to the Tour and previous Bold.

It feels much better in my hand and the keyboard is much better. More than anything, it feels 'richer' and not nearly as cheap feeling as the Tour and previous Bold. The polished metal bar looks very good and I like that the only colors are black and white on the keys. The touch screen is also really cool. Even though I don't use it much, it is very good to be able to pinch and zoom as needed. The screen is much more vivid and the 5 megapixel camera is a nice upgrade.

I've been reading about all the naysayers about RIM and how their products are not up to the iPhone and Android phones. I don't disagree with them regarding the older phones, but the 9930 is by far the best Blackberry I've ever had and seems to be of higher quality and with more features than any previous phone.

I've carried a personal Android phone (currently a Sprint Epic 4G) for a couple of years and this is the first Blackberry phone that is making me consider removing the Android from my personal family plan. (I'm an officer of our corporation, so I get unlimited use of the Blackberry provided by my company)

I realize there are numerous reviews on the 9900/9930 on here from new users, but I wanted to give my personal perspective from an enterprise user, who also likes to be able to use some personal features. (Twitter, LinkedIn, BBM)

Well done RIM!