Ending a degree of speculation, Research in Motion on Tuesday launched the BlackBerry Tour 9630. The smartphone is the first modern QWERTY keyboard device for CDMA networks and inherits the overall design of the Curve 8900, including its larger 2.44-inch 480x360 screen, but the keys of the Bold. It's also the second 3G world roaming phone for these networks in recent months and has both CDMA and EVDO Revision A for North American carriers but GSM and EDGE for the Americas as well as HSPA for European 3G services.

The design is now typical of the most recent BlackBerries with a 3.2-megapixel camera that carries autofocusing, flash and image stabilization, GPS mapping and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It has just 256MB of internal memory but a microSDHC slot to hold as much as 32GB of storage.

RIM's launch of the Tour doesn't have a definite release date and only has North American carriers picking up the phone in the summer. However, both Sprint and Verizon have promised to launch the phone in the near future in the US; Bell and Telus are known to be offering the phone in Canada.