BlackBerry may have lost its dominance of the business phone market, but you’ve got to give manufacturer RIM credit for keeping up in an increasingly crowded race. Of its recent slew of handsets the Torch 9810 is the one with the slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and includes a capacitive touchscreen and five-megapixel camera.
Design
Like virtually all slider models, it’s a bit of a chunky beast weighing 161g but has some sleek good looks thanks to its shiny black plastic with chrome-look trim.
The 3.2-inch screen is bright and clear and offers a perfectly decent 640×480-pixel resolution — sharp enough for viewing movies or reading smallish print on the web without straining your eyes. It’s sensitive in use too, easily distinguishing between brushes and presses, though the optical trackpad that sits immediately below it is very capable for navigating your way around menus and web pages.
The keyboard slides out from the bottom with a satisfying thunk to reveal 35 tightly packed keys. This is an area in which BlackBerry excels, and despite the small size of the keys, they’re carefully angled and ridged so that finding them under the thumbs is never a problem, and it’s easier to get up a decent head of texting speed here than on Samsung’s Galaxy Pro, for instance. An odd quirk of the keyboard however is that it won’t work when you’re holding the phone in landscape mode — as soon as you slide the keyboard out the screen is fixed in portrait mode and stays there, which can seem a bit weird at times.
Software, apps and performance
The operating system is the latest BlackBerry 7 OS, which offers a few tweaks to its predecessor rather than the kind of the radical reworking that Windows Phone 7 introduced over the old Windows Mobile platform. You’ll notice the difference though — the icons have changed, as has the menu layout. You now get four shortcut icons at the bottom of the screen, and you can scroll sideways to view different options in a range of sections: All, Favourites, Media, Downloads and Frequent (the latter here being a screen that is automatically populated with shortcuts to the apps you access most regularly).
BlackBerry’s new Universal Voice Search is here and although it doesn’t have as many features as the Android equivalent, which offers multiple interpretations of your words, it worked fine.
It also has the latest BlackBerry Messenger 6 (BBM) , which allows you to send free messages to other BlackBerry devices and wiil allow you to text your mates from within some games and apps, too. Incidentally, while BlackBerry App World has most of the basics covered, it’s looking distinctly under populated these days compared to its Apple and Android rivals.
The five-megapixel camera includes a very bright LED flash as well as autofocus, image stabilisation, geotagging, face detection and a variety of scene modes including macro. Picture quality is pretty good too and it features a 720p HD video recording capability. Many phones now capture video in 1080p HD, but 720 is still more than good enough for most uses. For storage, there’s 8GB of memory on board and you can add up to 32GB more via microSD card.
The 1.2GHz processor is powerful enough to keep things zipping along even when you’ve got multiple apps running, but there’s a price to pay with battery life however, which barely made it through a full day of heavy use.
Conclusion
The BlackBerry Torch 9810 adds an excellent slide-out QWERTY keyboard to a good sized touch screen, but the lack of apps and games in BlackBerry App World will be a turn-off for some when compared with rival Android and Apple models.
Source from: http://www.wired.co.uk
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