The Blackberry Torch Offers Impressive Features

The Torch is the first RIM device to come with the new Blackberry OS 6, with features that were eagerly anticipated for quite some time.

It weighs 161 grams (so it is heavier than the 137-gram iPhone 4), and with the sliding keyboard it is 15 mm deep. Thick is the best word for that, but it also gives a certain amount of robustness. Outside you find the 3.5mm jack (to use your own headphones), volume controls, camera button, microSD-slot around the rim, lock and mute buttons are on the top.

The upgraded OS has brought some long-awaited changes to the Torch while keeping the interface familiar for previous owners. Apart from the main menu, you get a fully customisable Favourites screen, a Media screen including Music, Videos or Pictures, Frequent for the applications used most recently, and finally, you get the Downloads screen as well. It is easier to use now (e.g. the customisation at Favourites can be done using the trackpad).
With the new OS 6, we get Universal Search. All you have to do is tap the magnifying glass on any screen (it is there on all of them), and there you go. It will look for the stuff you need amongst your contacts, browser history, YouTube, Blackberry AppWorld and Google Local Search.

The greatest strength of messaging remains: the Torch supports enterprise-level mailservers as well as able to synchronise web-based email to a single, filterable inbox.
Social feeds is new as well; with this, you can integrate your Facebook, AIM, Blackberry Messenger, Gtalk, MySpace, Windows or Yahoo Messenger into one continuous, but again siftable thread. Setting them up is done easily, using them is a breeze: if you choose to integrate Social Feeds with Messages, you will be informed when status updates on any of the aforementioned feeds occur together with your text messages, emails etc. RIM took the liberty to upload their own Facebook, Twitter and YouTube-client on the Blackberry Torch.

For messages to type in quickly, you need a decent keyboard. As it is a slide-out unit here, you would need to hold the phone with both hands to support the weight, and type with your thumbs. If you want to type using one hand only, the virtual keyboard is your choice: in landscape mode it has decent-sized keys and it includes a predictive text-entry system as well.

As for the screen, even though it has a resolution of 480x360 pixels, it still is excellent e.g. for playing back YouTube videos.
It features multitouch, so when using the Webkit browser, it does give a new experience. Zoom, double tap, autowrap all ensure more convenient browser usage, which, from now on is tabbed, so should you want to open several threads, look no further. Webkit supports Flash Lite so pages load relative quickly, even with a CPU of 624 MHz clockspeed.

For other multimedia-applications: the 5 megapixel camera takes decent images and it includes a LED flash as well. You can transfer data via PnP or download podcasts directly from the internet (they appear in the Podcasts library).

As for the one of the most important points, battery life; With moderate browsing, multimedia-playback with WiFi on, it lasts well into the second day.

The Blackberry Torch, with the upgraded OS, good screen and simple usage is easily one of the best Blackberry handsets on the market, and existing fans of the brand are sure to be impressed, and the handset is also likely to create a lot of new Blackberry enthusiasts.

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