The Blackberry Torch - Is It Worth Buying?

A quick look at the recently released Blackberry Torch set our hearts burning with desire. Especially for business executives, the design of the smartphone is sufficient to dazzle your eyes and trigger your curiosity.

The Blackberry Torch carries the distinctive trademark of Blackberry mobile phones through its dashing black color. However, a combination of the elegant curved edges and the white and dark orange colors results in a modern look that will easily capture the attention of the younger professionals and teenagers. The Torch is a similar size to the Blackberry Bold 9700. Although there is a thickness difference of 2.5mm, you'll benefit from a full-sized touchscreen in addition to a slide out keyboard.

The Blackberry Torch features a full-sized 3.2 inch capacitive touchscreen with 16M colors. Although the resolution of 360 x 480 pixels is not as appealing as the other high-end smartphones, it works fine with the mainstream users who are non-movie fanatics. To be fair, the full-sized touchscreen and physical keyboard combination carries a huge advantage over majority of Blackberry smartphones. The full screen web browsing experience and "Pinch and zoom" capability will drive most Blackberry fans crazy.

RIM deserves praise for successfully introducing the visual experience without sacrificing any of their key advantages. As with the previous Blackberry smartphones, you'll find the optical trackpad and their signature QWERTY keyboard. The familiar keyboard effectively improves your email and text messaging capabilities, just like the other Blackberry smartphones. Just before you draft your email, slide the display open to reveal the full QWERTY keyboard.

The Blackberry Torch comes along with GPS, 3G (HSDPA and HSUPA), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and a 5 MP camera. It is a surprise that great emphasis was placed on the Torch's camera. It allows video recording (640 x 480), continuous autofocus, LED flash, image stabilization and 11 camera modes. The only missing capability is HD video recording. The phone also includes 4GB of internal memory and supports up to 32GB of maximum capacity (256MB on the BB9700). As for the battery life, you'll get 5 hours and 40 minutes of talktime and 30 hours of music.

Although the qualities of the new Torch sends Blackberry fans screaming for joy, RIM is definitely unsatisfied. Why else would they introduce the Blackberry 6 OS to the smartphone? The new OS6 features comprehensive changes that will place immense pressure on Blackberry's competitors. Some of the changes come from feedback that "the Blackberry doesn't render websites accurately" and "the menus look outdated". As a result, there is new web browser that features tabbed browsing and an intuitive graphical menu that comes along with modern icons. There is also a social feed application that constantly displays new tweets and Facebook status updates in a timeline.

The Blackberry version 6 OS wouldn't be complete without the ingenious universal search function. Simply by keying in your keywords, your Blackberry Torch will be able to search and bring your required app, email, file or message to you. Just imagine the amount of time you can save!

It is needless to mention how much difference the Blackberry 6 OS has made to the Torch. Although critics might comment that the Torch is still not a mean multimedia machine, it is by far the best Blackberry business phone with extended multimedia capabilities. What do you think?