It’s already been an incredible summer of wildly popular smartphone launches and it looks like the parade isn’t going to end anytime soon. Next up in line are Verizon and RIM with the launch of the BlackBerry Tour on Verizon Wireless. This full-featured smartphone hits stores this Sunday, July 12, and if these early reviews are any indication (CNET, Engadget Mobile, Boy Genius), this is going to be a hot device. Of course, as with almost all of today’s top smartphones, TeleNav is right there to bring our industry leading turn-by-turn navigation application to the BlackBerry Tour on Verizon. 

The latest version of TeleNav GPS Navigator (v5.5) will be available immediately from our Web site, complete with a 30-day free trial, for all of you who head out and purchase the BlackBerry Tour this Sunday. If you’re looking to add a turn-by-turn navigation application to your Tour, here’s a few of the features you’ll get with TeleNav GPS Navigator for $9.99/month:

  • Turn-by-turn, voice guidance – TeleNav GPS Navigator incorporates turn-by-turn, voice-guided directions. Now you can go beyond a basic map view of your location and receive guidance along your entire route, factoring in elements such as traffic and your personal route preferences. TeleNav GPS Navigator will turn your BlackBerry Tour into a lean, mean GPS machine
  • An always up-to-date experience - going beyond what you get with most personal navigation devices, TeleNav GPS Navigator uses the BlackBerry Tour’s connectivity to ensure the maps and point of interest databases you’re depending on are up-to-date, with updates provided every three months
  • Real-time traffic information - with TeleNav GPS Navigator on your BlackBerry Tour, you’ll receive real-time traffic information and the ability to re-route around traffic at the push of a button. You can also receive traffic alerts directly on your phone to help you decide if you’re ready to leave the office to brave the traffic or if you want to wait a few minutes for a less congested drive home
  • Gas Price Information - TeleNav GPS Navigator instantly returns results for gas prices in your area, even breaking it down by grade. In these summer months where gas prices climb higher and higher, finding the best gas price can be a great way to save a few bucks.  
  • Millions of Points of Interest - With TeleNav GPS Navigator on your BlackBerry Tour, you’ll have access to more than 10 million points of interest, ranging from restaurants to ATMs to Wi-Fi hotspots. No matter where you’re traveling, you will have instant access to any business you may need to locate and easily navigate to it
  • Voice entry - As you’ll see in the video accompanying this post, TeleNav GPS Navigator incorporates voice entry, so not only can you type in an address or business, but with a single touch of the screen, you can speak it and the application will recognize the location and get you started on your way
  • Planning ahead - With TeleNav GPS Navigator, you can preplan online and send addresses and business listings from your computer to your phone. The next time you start the application, the addresses will be available and ready for you to hit the open road

We got our hands on Verizon’s BlackBerry Tour and decided instead of just talking about what TeleNav GPS Navigator can do on the phone, we’d show you. So, I hopped in the car for a trip to a local Starbucks here in Sunnyvale. To show all of the ways you can find a location, I headed to the Starbucks using the search function with text entry and headed back to the office using voice entry. I won’t make any claims of being a professional actor, but we hope the video gives you a good idea of what TeleNav GPS Navigator can do on the BlackBerry Tour.

And we’re not stopping at video. Because there is so much excitement around this Sunday’s launch of the BlackBerry Tour on Verizon, we’ve decided to declare next week Tour de BlackBerry Week here at TeleNav. We’ll be running a daily contest for readers to win a one-year subscription of TeleNav GPS Navigator (or one of the carrier-branded navigation applications from our partners) through a Tour de France trivia contest. So stay tuned . . .