March Smart Phone Madness Game 5: Motorola Devour vs. BlackBerry Tour

Voting has concluded for this contest, but more Smart Phone Madness awaits!

We’ve never seen this much passion over smart phone battles before as some of our readers help devices make last minute surges. Yesterday, the HTC HD2 slaughtered the BlackBerry Storm 2 – it didn’t even look like a fair fight even though it was off to an even start. Today, we’re pitting the Motorola Devour with Motoblur against the BlackBerry Tour 9630, both handsets on Verizon. Will the Devour’s solid build and heft help it muscle its way past the push e-mail machine? Let’s take a look and find out!

When the BlackBerry Tour 9630 was released last summer, we called it the best smart phone on Verizon. And it really was. The device was snappy and we liked the build and keyboard. There’s also no denying every BlackBerry out there is packing the most solid and reliable e-mail service on any smart phone. It also has great call quality and battery life, two important features that are often overlooked on most smart phones in favor of UIs, applications, and media.

The Tour has a comfortable keyboard that allows us to type fast and comfortably with good feedback. The screen is sharp and bright, and the trackball below is a nice rubbery black (so that you don’t get the cruddy brown trackballs anymore. Overall, this is a solid smart phone in terms of build, services and applications available through BlackBerry App World and is easy to see why it made it to Editor’s Choice.

Charging against the Tour is Motorola’s new Devour for Verizon. It is Verizon’s third Android handset after the Droid Eris and the Motorola Droid. It comes with Motorola’s Motoblur user interface which aggregates all of your social networks, e-mail and media services into one place. It should go without saying that Android’s winning features are its open platform, syncing with Google services, and the wealth of applications avaiable for it.

We were definitely big fans of the Devour’s hardware and design: it’s sturdy, sleek and fits well in the hand. The sliding mechanism gives us a satisfying click when opening and closing it. The keyboard, however, was a little mediocre and we feel like the layout could have been better. For some reason, the capcitive touchscreen wasn’t always responsive to our touch commands and some events were being missed – always a nuisance for touchscreen devices.

This is all going to boil down to a matter of preference because BlackBerry fans will always root for BlackBerry, and Android fans may just give this one to the Devour. The Tour just screams business while the Devour is more playful and social. If you’re in either camp, grab your beers and your giant “We’re #1″ gloves and tell all your friends to vote below!