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."
Meh (Score:1)
The hardware looks decent (except for that low-res screen...wtf?), but I'm not entirely sold on the new OS revision.
Disclosure: I've never been much a fan of Blackberry OS.
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I bet that's why a blackberry can last with heavy usage much better than the others.
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No, BB simply has a much more efficient push email system than ActiveSync, or polling every 15 minutes.
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.
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On the flip side, the new Blackberry devices are fairly small, and if you compare prices, why get a Blackberry at this point? E-mail is handled well by most of the new smartphones out there, giving the edge to Blackberry ONLY when it comes to the corporate stuff(exchange servers and such). Give it another few years and Blackberry won't have ANY advantage when it comes to e-mail, so what will RIM do then?
RIM is really following in the footsteps of Palm.
Palm had a huge advantage, but sticking with an
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As it happens, that was a weird language/location/regional mode that arbitrarily flipped on my workstation for no obvious reason. It wasn't anything to do with my Blackberry.
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Apparently SureType needs more processing power.
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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
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> 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?
Cost.
When you look at all the high-end phones being sold you sometimes get the idea that cost doesn't matter anymore. And for many consumers that is true, but businesses are less likely to want to pay for expensive capabilities that aren't needed.
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heya,
Blackberry devices aren't that much cheaper.
For example, in my work here in Australia, I was told that our BB 9700 handsets were around $740, even after all the carrier discounts from Telstra (we're a very-large IB).
For that sort of money, you can nearly get a iPhone 4, or a Android phone.
For my personal phone, I have a Nexus One, and apart from the lack of a tactile keyboard, it's much nicer to the BB 9700 handset I use. The only drawback is the battery life, which is obviously lower, due to the large
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360x480 is lower than phones from 2+ years ago. I guess it's a start?
Bad Apple (Score:5, Funny)
How you like RIM, Jobs?
Re:Bad Apple (Score:5, Funny)
I once had a recruiter contact me about a position at Research in Motion. For the next 2-3 days as we corresponded back and forth, I kept receiving emails titled "re: Rim Job" "re: re: Rim Job" "re: re: re: Rim Job".
I suppose I'm lucky they weren't all immediately filtered as spam.
Re:Bad Apple (Score:5, Funny)
A job at Research in Motion.
Re:Bad Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
The best part? Their careers site is rim.jobs [rim.jobs].
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Trust me, as an employee, the RIM job jokes never stop, and get old very quickly.
Be thankful that you're on the receiving end.
It must be a million times worse for HR kids there, being the ones whose job is to literally give rim jobs to people.
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So there is no reason the current crop of Android devices or iPhones would pick the Blackberry Torch 9800 over a non business person?
I suppose that is a true statement, but kind of a weird thing to say.
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I don't get this artificial distinction between "business" users and "non business" users.
I carry a blackberry for business. But I explicitly chose a model that has MP3, WiFi, camera, and GPS because those features made it a whole lot more useful to me as a personal device.
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
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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
Youtube? Is that you?
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Push email on my iPhone comes in just moments behind the Blackberry (have them both on my desk and just ran a few tests). I find the doc/pdf reader on the Apple device to be MUCH nicer than the crappy BB one.
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My iPhone often rings the new email alert a second or two before Outlook does.
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Business user: I need fast push access to e-mail and critical documents wherever I go. I don't care about anything else.
Seriously, you can read critical non-text-format documents conveniently on a Blackberry? Far too much of my material comes in as PDF and it's acceptable on an iPhone with its excellent PDF reader. I'm sure modern Android devices do something similar, and have some larger screens (EVO and Droid X). My sister has a Blackberry and the UI, scrolling, and screen resolution are all miserable
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Well, there's the thing. You're carrying it for business, but if you didn't need it for that, would you get one?
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Once you have a smart phone, they are damned hard to give up, aren't they?
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ive got an old curve 8330 and consider it a decent phone. itll do most everything a modern touch screen phone will do, its just a little slower and not as pretty about it. id like a modern smartphone because im a nerd who likes tech stuff like that, not because i need it.
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I'm also carrying a Blackberry (older Curve 83xx series) for work, and just about anything newer (especially if it had 3G, dear God EDGE is slow up here in the hinterlands!) would be preferable. But, having said that, would I choose another Blackberry for personal use?
Maybe.
I have little experience with any other phone, so I don't have much of a position from which to judge. I have an iPod Touch and typing on it is an exercise in living, screaming hell, so for that and several other reasons the iPhone is
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I agree it's a shame physical keyboards aren't more common. I love my 5800, but I would have liked something with an actual keyboard as well as touch (there weren't any that I could see on PAYG in the price range I was looking).
The interesting thing is, I've seen a few dirt cheap feature phones with slide out QWERTY keyboards - e.g., the LG 360 for a measly £40 [tesco.com] - so it doesn't seem to be something that should massively increase the costs.
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Android as activesync support, which exchange and many exchange like email solutions use.
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Business user: The corporate security and audit teams says all of that stuff has to be turned off.
I used to work at a company that required that even the phone feature be disabled on all blackberries connected to the corporate Exchange servers...
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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)?)
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AT&T - No Thanks (Score:1)
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Makes me feel like a second class citizen...
Big corporations are the first class citizens.
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...if you can call what AT&T and Verizon do 'service'...
I dunno, from reading around here they seem to "service" [thefreedictionary.com] (definition 12) their customers quite well...
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AT&T is hardly the only mobile carrier to offer BlackBerry handsets. Blame T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon for not outbidding AT&T to be first to carry this model.
According to Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Blech (Score:2, Interesting)
RIM is like Microsoft: not the best made stuff, but business adopted it so it's a standard of sorts.
I hate that my workplace will buy us Blackberries but won't go iPhone (or whatever). I end up swapping the SIM to my personal iPhone and all is well but it's still wear and tear on my own stuff.
.
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.
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I will concede that point about the Curves (83xx). I loved my 8800 but it was stolen so I decided to get the newer Curve and as you mentioned it borks every so often requiring a hard reset. My 8800 never gave me problems like that and I wouldn't mind getting another 88xx series.
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We have had opposite experience. We do provide work iPhones and support them. iPhone users we never hear from again about Email. Blackberries on other hand are constantly loosing connection to BES, BES looses connection to mailbox, reset their BES account, clean out their Blackberry queue, it's never ending ticket queue.
Between most sysadmins I know, their dislike of BES is pretty universal and we wish they would embrace ActiveSync like everyone else.
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Blackberries on other hand are constantly loosing connection to BES, BES looses connection to mailbox
Why don't you tighten up your connection then?
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Between most sysadmins I know, their dislike of BES is pretty universal and we wish they would embrace ActiveSync like everyone else.
Ditto. Once Exchange is set up to support ActiveSync, users can set up their own Windows Mobile or iPhones without any IT support. BES requires extra hardware and software licenses, plus the time from IT workers. And that's if the BES is working properly.
Why people want to continue going down the BES route is a mystery.
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First of all, there's a common misconception amongst a lot of people that BlackBerries require BES, they do not, BlackBerries can hook directly into ActiveSync just like other smartphones without a BES.
I just had to do a smartphone comparison at the company I work for, as much as I hate the BB browser and it's laggy OS, there are quite a few compelling features for businesses on BES:
- BES Express is now free and doesn't require a corre
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BlackBerries can hook directly into ActiveSync just like other smartphones without a BES.
Ah, it's been several years since I've messed with them, but that didn't used to be true. It used to be you had to use either BES, or a web based service that BlackBerry provided that would poll the email server via IMAP or POP3 and then pass them on to the phone.
Of course, at the time the only thing that did ActiveSync was WindowsMobile, which was pretty terrible.
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With BES being free now though, that's a pretty compelling solution, I'm surprised RIM hasn't advertised that more. It will co-exist just fine on the existing Exchange backend server with less than 50 BES users, so it's not like you need to sink money on hardware either if you're a small business.
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First of all, there's a common misconception amongst a lot of people that BlackBerries require BES, they do not, BlackBerries can hook directly into ActiveSync just like other smartphones without a BES.
I believe the Blackberry BIS service only supports Outlook Web Access (Not true ActiveSync), there are third party apps for ActiveSync but from my research they are a bit cumbersome to use.
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Why people want to continue going down the BES route is a mystery
Well I know one reason I moved to a Blackberry and BES was that ActiveSync didn't handle notes. Additionally the iPhone didn't handle tasks. I don't know if any Andoid based devices do but none did when I was looking in January of this year.
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I'm almost certain you cannot swap a SIM provisioned with BlackBerry data services into a non-BlackBerry phone and get data; certainly if your company has a BES. And if they're hardcore about security, they probably have BES.
What you could do is get a dual-SIM case for your iPhone. They tend to be clunky, though.
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That's bizarre. I'm a Rogers customer as well and I'm pretty sure that BIS/BES service SIMs won't work in a non-Blackberry device ever. I'll give this a try.
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I end up swapping the SIM to my personal iPhone
If it helps, I know a number of RIM employees who do the same thing.
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RIM is like Microsoft: not the best made stuff, but business adopted it so it's a standard of sorts.
Well, that depends what you mean by "best".
The blackberry platform is the most secure, strongly encrypted mobile email/internet platform out there.
The blackberry platform has been audited from end-to-end [blackberry.com] & certified by the governments of Canada, USA, UK, Austria, New Zealand, Australia & Turkey, along with NATO and the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology in Germany.
Iphone has been a
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If they're buying it for you, I'm not sure what the complaint is. I "hate" that my workplace doesn't buy me Blackberries, N97s or Desires...
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If you're lucky enough to get a (presumably free) phone from work, stop whining about it.
Waaaaaaaaahhhh my company only gave me this crappy 1 year old HP laptop instead of a new MacBook waaaaaahhhhhhh.
Waaaaaaaaahhhhmy company car's only a Ford instead of a Porsche waaaaaaaaahhhhhh.
WebKit (Score:4, Interesting)
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No kidding. Have you ever tried developing for the BlackBerry browser, or the Widget API, which uses the same rendering engine? Netscape 4 is literally more capable and standards-compliant by comparison. It's virtually unusable to do anything beyond bare basics with JavaScript or CSS (and even then, behavior is often inconsistent and unreliable).
The Widget API is also perplexing in its own right. Although it supposedly uses the same rendering engine, its implementation of the DOM is slightly different f
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- touchscreen, trackpad, slide-out keyboard: stop bitching about input methods
- multi-touch, pinch-to-zoom, new webkit browser: stop bitching about web surfing
- new app world with carrier billing, new developer SDK: stop bitching about apps
- integrated youtube, facebook, twitter, myspace: stop bitching about being for corporate users only
Wether this will reduce steady flow of users conver
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-QNX: Stop bitching about our shitty OS
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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.
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HTC + Android FTW (Score:1)
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Why?
From what I hear Blackberry does what it's designed to do very well and very securely. RIM also seem to make reliable phone with the exception of the original Storm.
My android phone doesn't even come close to handling work email as well as the Blackberry.
There is nothing wrong with picking the best phone that meets your purpose. Android is okay. The support isn't there, and it sure isn't as integrated as the Blackberry with enterprise email.
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Look and feel (Score:5, Interesting)
The Torch feels and looks very much like a BlackBerry
Wait. Is that supposed to be a compliment? The only nice things to say about Blackberry relate to their keyboards and enterprise software.
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And security, don't forget how much more secure the blackberry is. Why do you think repressive governments don't like them?
Also, blackberries use less network resources then other phones. Kind of nice if you have a data limited plan.
Call quality on the blackberry is always exceptional.
Battery life is pretty good, compared to other smart phones.
So except for the keyboards, enterprise software, security, network compression, call quality and battery life, Blackberries are just average.
when is the post mortum (Score:2)
Does anything other than WebKit on this phone not scream lock in? Unless I fell into a time loop, it requires either a slew of Microsoft only software and their own expensive proprietary daemon or administrators to do go through a bunch of bs to send internal information back out to some service to be functional.
So a blackberry with expensive server software or reduced security and pain for your admin vs. iPhone or any Android based phone.
I hope the death of RIM is nearing.
Renamed for the UK market... (Score:3, Funny)
The phone will be dubbed the "Blackberry Flashlight 9800" for UK owners
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Let's just hope they don't have any battery overheating problems, or the "Torch" name will turn into a bad pun really, REALLY fast.
As an indie BB developer... (Score:5, Interesting)
As an indie BB developer, I've mixed impressions here. The changes to OS6 look very promising (I'll be digging in more tonight since they released the SDK today, but so far they look good -- and this on top of a platform that was pretty solid to begin with, even if not the flashiest out there.) There are also some cool features - like gesture support on the trackpad, integrated search, etc - which I'm looking forward to playing with.
A lot of things I've had to manually code workarounds for are now part of the OS. This is a two-edged sword though: I still need to support older platforms (thus must keep my legacy code); yet also want to have the more efficient/integrated advantage that comes with using native APIs. It's not *too* painful as I've already determined handling for this scenario in previous OS versions (5.0, 4.7, 4.6, 4.5, 4.3...) ... but it is frustrating as some of these things really should have been there all along. (On the other hand: this isn't a problem specific to BB. -- it's a problem with developing against any platform that undergoes significant improvements over time.)
I was looking forward to the Torch hardware itself - since my first BB (8700c) I was thinking it would be really cool if they found a way to merge their keyboard with the Palm touchscreens. When I heard about it, I had geekgasms. Now that I'm seeing the specs... my reaction is mixed. I'm seeing a lot of feedback about the relatively slow processor (compared to other smartphones); but realistically I don't anticipate that to have much effect. My experience with BB has shown that Well written apps will run well; poorly written apps will run poorly; but the core OS will remain snappy. As long as that doesn't change, I'm not too concerned about the CPU speed. (the only exception was the 8800 - that thing was dog-slow... don't know what they were thinking.) Even the RAM doesn't bother me - though I am still h oping we'll see the ability to run apps off of SD card or at least on-board flash. Either of these would make RAM an absolute non-issue.
What disappoints me is the screen resolution: this device has the same resolution as my 9700-- which has a much smaller screen. I really expected this to get bumped up a notch in this release, and the fact that it hasn't has me debating whether i want to get the Torch, or wait for the Flaming Torch or whatever the next version of the hardware will be. Considering how long I've been wanting exactly this device, the idea of waiting for a next rev is irksome.
Overall: the OS looks good. The API improvements make a solid system even better. The new tools for web-based apps look very promising, and a vast improvement over their previous iteration. The hardware is "meh", but still a step up; I only wish the screen were better resolution. The fact that they're now including app store with the OS itself is also a huge improvement: too many people think that the crapware links that AT&T/whoever pushes to the phone are the extent of the BB app selection, and that's not the case. Hopefully this push (along with their planned marketing) will make both developers and consumers more aware that BB is a good platform for apps.
New OS (Score:2)
Sounds like, unlike Apple, Palm or Android, they wrote a multi-threaded OS capable of running WebKit from scratch, rather then being based on Linux or BSD.
Although it's not really that hard if only have to support limited hardware you've designed yourself and you have ready access graduates from one of the most respected Computer Science programs in the world (University of Waterloo).
Thanks, brain! (Score:2)
I read all the way to the end of one of TFAs before realizing it's "torch", not "touch."
BlackBerry Torch?!? (Score:2)
Battery life (Score:2)
Battery life is about 20% lower (1500mAh down to 1300 or so), and now it has to power a bigger ,touch-capable screen. Doesn't look good for battery life.
Screen resolution (Score:1)
UK market (Score:2)
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