Hands On With the BlackBerry Torch 9800 126
adeelarshad82 writes "Research in Motion announced the company's first slider-style BlackBerry, the Torch 9800, which is also the first BlackBerry with both a touch screen and hard keyboard, and the first device to run the new OS 6. The Torch feels and looks very much like a BlackBerry, with the proper BlackBerry Bold-style arrangements of plastic, metal, and glass; there are also BlackBerry fonts on the keys and the now-standard BlackBerry trackpad. The Torch's 3.2-inch, 360-by-480 screen is a standard capacitive LCD touch screen. The screen is bright and sharp, but it's obviously behind the competition in terms of resolution. The Torch has a 5-megapixel camera with VGA video recording, Bluetooth 2.1, 512 MB of program memory, 4 GB of built-in storage, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. The Torch has the same 624-MHz Marvell processor as the existing BlackBerry Bold. The new BlackBerry 6 OS adds touch to the interface mix. RIM appears to have totally rewritten its media apps. There's a new Desktop Manager coming with BlackBerry 6, and a Social Feeds app that combines Twitter, Facebook, and various instant messaging conversations."
Re:Groundbreaking [2007]! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Groundbreaking [2007]! (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't get this artificial distinction between "business" users and "non business" users.
Business user: I need fast push access to e-mail and critical documents wherever I go. I don't care about anything else.
Personal user: LOL i just want 2 play sum farmville and take sum pictures of my doggie and put it on fabo and omg twitter i liek dont care if it works all the time k just as long as its pretty pretty!!!!1111ONE00110001
Re:Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Blech (Score:4, Insightful)
Where I work they recently started allowing employees to bring their own 3Gs/4 iPhones to the network with the caveat there would be no support whatsoever to those people. In the the few months that policy has been in place there have been numerous company wide mobile email outages to those iPhones. Of course many executives switched and you can't NOT support the execs. AT&T couldn't figure out what the problem was and neither could Apple. In the 4 years I've been here I can count on one hand the number of times the email on the Blackberries has gone down. I've been discouraging people from getting iPhones for work and now I can actually offer them an alternative. I welcome the Torch with open arms.
Re:Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Meh (Score:3, Insightful)
Meh for the average user, true. Nice to see RiM focusing back on business users without trying to introduce an "iPhone killer".
And how are they focusing on businesses moreso than they already do? It looks like they're missing the forest for the trees by rushing to include every new buzzword-laden technology (Social Feeds! Instant messaging! Facebook!) without actually understanding the underlying themes and trends. To me, that seems like the antithesis of "focusing on business users."
Also, why is it that businesses cannot benefit from the (considerably superior) graphical, processing, and multitouch capabilities of the current crop of Android and iOS devices?
Re:Groundbreaking [2007]! (Score:4, Insightful)
Any reasons people would pick an Iphone over the current crop of Android devices or Blackberries?
Any reasons people would pick an Android device over the current crop of Iphones or Blackberries?
(You forgot Symbian btw - the number one platform, and as of Q2 2010 still increasing their lead over Blackberry and Apple, with their increase in sales second only to Android.)
And on a related note, I'm pleased that we manage to get coverage of the Blackberry without an obligatory astroturfing comparison to "the Iphone" as if it were number one, neither in the article nor the summary. Unfortunately the BBC are on their usual Apple spinning form, with the headline "RIM launches Blackberry Torch to challenge iPhone" [bbc.co.uk]. (Does any other kind of product get a reference to a less successful competitor when it's covered in the news? And why pick Apple rather than Android (who are growing faster) or Nokia (who are number one)?)
Re:Blech (Score:2, Insightful)
Blackberries on other hand are constantly loosing connection to BES, BES looses connection to mailbox
Why don't you tighten up your connection then?
Re:WebKit (Score:1, Insightful)
Are people really converting en masse?
I know Blackberry is losing smartphone market share in a hurry, but how much of that is the changing focus of the smartphone market? There are lots more individuals jumping in and choosing consumer-friendly phones instead of business-friendly phones.
I kinda think Blackberry might stick around forever like IBM or Novell or whatever, boring (but profitable) companies making boring (but reliable) business products for boring (but wealthy) customers.
Re:Meh (Score:4, Insightful)
Internals are a bit disappointing [boygeniusreport.com]. Why are they only putting a 624Mhz processor in their new flagship device? HTC, Apple, Moto & Samsung are all using 1ghz ARM variants in their flagship phones--with higher speeds and dual core phones on the near horizon.
Get this... if you don`t spend all your processing time making animated zooming window borders and other GUI frills, you don`t NEED an insane processor. What does a cell phone need to do?
Make calls... doesn`t need much processing power.
Look up contacts. Make appointments. Access memos... doesn`t need much processing power.
Take pictures. Display low-res video. Encode and decode music... doesn`t need much processing power.
If your phone seems slow, it`s because it`s full of glitzy crap. My Bold 9700 does everything I ask it to do, immediately. It doesn`t lag. It isn`t slow. It doesn`t - in a nutshell - need a faster processor.