The BlackBerry Torch 9800 doesn’t stray far from the usual solidity of their hardware, but it’s also their very time utilizing a sliding portrait QWERTY keyboard. Chrome plating accentuates most of the front and sides which is combined with a plastic rear cover that has a patterned soft touch layer for better grip. The bottom of the phone is curved, which provides an ergonomic grip in your hand. There is no doubt the damage it will suffer from a fall, especially when it uses a sliding mechanism.
The Torch is by no means something innovative from a design perspective, but it clearly stands for some of the best design elements used in previous devices and combines them. The Torch 9800 is sticking with a tried and true stationary touchscreen without any tricks. Coming with a 3.2” HVGA+ 360×480 pixels display, it doesn’t impress against the WVGA and upward resolutions used by some contending smartphones. With slightly less space than the Storm2 and retaining the same resolution, the level of detail remains unchanged but sometimes texts may come out to be smaller and sometimes fuzzier.
The sliding portrait QWERTY keyboard’s opening and closing mechanism feels solid and requires a slight nudge to open or close it. As for the QWERTY, it closely resembles the ones found on both the Bold 9650 and 9700 with its sensible feedback; however, it’s less noticeable and more at level with its adjacent surface. On the other hand, individuals with bigger fingers will find it a bit cramped since the buttons lack spacing in between. Overall, the QWERTY very useful with the on-screen options especially with its visible white backlighting. With the portrait or landscape style full keyboard in use, we found it to be responsive to the touch and casually typed with a few mistakes mixed in. The experience was pretty satisfactory with no slowdown or unresponsiveness when typing.
The BlackBerry Torch 9800 won’t let down world travellers since it’s a quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900MHz) and UMTS (850/900/1900/2100MHz) device which means it’ll work in many locations but unfortunately CDMA is unavailable. The Torch also features Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1 and aGPS, if that helps.
With the WebKit based browser, pages loaded in a reasonable amount of time in a zoomed out view. Double tapping a specific area will resize the text to fit the display; however, we did come across some inconsistencies in certain pages. Multi touch gestures allow you to specify the zoom level but text won’t automatically adjust itself. Scrolling is a breeze once a page is fully loaded, but we did experience cases when images and sometimes text requiring some time to render. Although the Torch has improved on wed browsing, it’s only at the tip of the iceberg in this category when compared to the Motorola DROID X or Apple iPhone 4.
The BlackBerry Torch doesn’t disappoint as it was stress-tested with one solid day of heavy usage with leftover charge for the next day. We could have further optimized our time by manually lowering the brightness level to the lowest setting and closing down unused apps.
Full Phone Specifications
Network
2G GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100 /800
Available released 2010, August
Size
Dimensions 111 x 62 x 14.6 mm
Weight 161 g
Display
TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
360 x 480 pixels, 3.2 inches
- QWERTY keyboard
- Optical trackpad
- Multi-touch input method
- Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
Memory
Practically unlimited phonebook entries and fields, Photocall
Call records
4 GB Internal storage, 512 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM
MicroSD card slot up to 32GB (4GB card included)
Data
GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 - 48 kbps
EDGE Class 10, 236.8 kbps
3G HSDPA; HSUPA
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, UMA (carrier-dependent)
Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP
MicroUSB v2.0
Camera
Primary 5 MP, 2592х1944 pixels, autofocus, LED flash
Features Geo-tagging, continuous auto-focus, image stabilization
Video VGA @24fps
Sound
Alert types, Vibration, MP3 ringtones
Loudspeaker
3.5mm jack audio
Features
BlackBerry OS 6.0
CPU 624 MHz processor
Messaging (SMS, MMS, Email, Push Email, IM)
HTML Browser
Games + downloadable
GPS with A-GPS support
Java MIDP 2.0
- Social feeds
- BlackBerry maps
- Document viewer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint)
- Media player MP3/WMA/eAAC+/FlAC/OGG player
- Video player DivX/XviD/MP4/WMV/H.263/H.264
- Organizer
- Voice memo/dial
Battery
Standard battery, Li-Ion 1300 mAh
Stand-by Up to 432 h (2G) / Up to 336 h (3G)
Talk time Up to 5 h 30 min (2G) / Up to 5 h 40 min (3G)
Music play Up to 30 h
Available colors : Black, White, Dark Orange
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