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This review might be a little late for those already in possession of the Torch, officially known as the BlackBerry Torch 9800 Slider phone. It has been around in the market for more than a couple of months now, and illegally a little more than that. To them, I’d like to say: You are in the safe, this one is a keeper.

The Torch is easily the only BlackBerry phone that I took to like fish to water. No other phone from the RIM stable managed that with me. Not the Bold. Not the Pearl. No other. Why so, you ask? For me, the best bit about the Torch is that it supports one-hand operations. That, my friend, was last seen on a legendary Palm phone called the Treo. And I really thought that we had seen the last of such phones. It takes minimal effort of one thumb to push up the slider screen, type quickly on the very responsive QWERTY keyboard, a couple of clicks on the optical trackpad, and slide the screen back into place. The rubbery back of the phone helps, too, in gripping the phone better, as does its weight of 160-odd grams.

The screen itself, though, is a letdown in terms of resolution, but not in touch responsiveness. If anything, it matches up to the best touch phones out there in the market, except for the iPhone. The resolution, however, tops out at 480 x 360—way behind what the Torch’s contemporaries have to offer. It’s like throwing a CRT TV in a market ripe with LED TVs. Everything, be it photos or text, looked a lot less detailed than required.

The camera is easy to operate, though the picture quality is not exactly the kind you’d want your wedding album to flaunt. However, I am quite neutral to the 5-meg snapper. There are many worse snappers out there, but not many better. Barring night snaps, it’s above par for casual shooting. Video quality, though, is the pits. Socks to be pulled up here, please.

Coming to down to what a smartphone needs to do first and foremost—calling, messaging, networking, and the works—the Torch comes out on tops of almost all other BlackBerry phones I have used. The battery life lasts just a little more than half a day on full use of the calling, messenger, surfing, and push e-mail functions. That is way beyond most of the Android phones floating in the market.

Also, calls are loud and clear, the messenger and e-mail functions work as per the BlackBerry legend, and surfing is easy (though website rendering needs some tweaking). I do not like the Facebook and Twitter apps, however; they are slow and glitchy. You are better off getting a third-party client for both.
The ‘glitchy-ness’ (if that is a word) I mention could have something to do with the juice that’s powering the Torch. What we have here is a very ordinary 624 MHz processor juicing the pretty heavy and even slightly messy OS6 operating system, BlackBerry’s latest. However, this baby requires a better juice pack. Period.

The reason why I say the software is heavy and messy is because I cannot understand what the hell this version is aimed at. Is it going to be used only for touch phones or is it going to be used for all BlackBerry phones from now on? Because if it’s the latter, at least it gives some credence to how the interface has shaped up on the Torch. The designers were simply not sure what to do here, is how I see it.

Take, for example, the homescreen. Instead of going for a full screen with all the essential apps on it for easy access, what we have is a drawer system; that means you click on the screen to reveal a tray of all the apps, and then navigate to the one you want. Fair enough. But why can’t I customize it to place the apps I need on the homescreen for instant access? Denying me that is just wrong. You can, however, switch between drawers going left to right, from “all” of your apps to the “media” one or the “downloaded” one. But that is just too many more clicks than necessary to get to an app you are most likely to use.

But not all is bad with the interface. For one, I completely dig the universal search function on the Torch. It works like it should. Type in a few letters and it will find you a contact, an e-mail, or whatever from your phone. And if it’s not there, it will offer to scour the web, networks and app stores to get it for you. In this manner, you could actually kind of bypass the phone’s rather muddled drawer system.

So where does the Torch stand in the highly heated up smartphone market? Let me put it this way: People who have and love their BlackBerry phones will love the Torch even more. It is just a notch up from every other RIM phone out there. However, for people using Androids and iPhones, the switch is not likely.

For one, the OS lags behind. Second, the App World lags behind the app markets on other operating systems. Third, Androids and iPhones are plain and simple still a lot ‘cooler’, even though the Torch itself does have a higher cool quotient than its predecessors.

So, who will switch? Why, of course, those who crave the BlackBerry’s brilliant e-mail and messenger functions. I certainly do. If Torch 2 comes out with a slicker OS and interface, it will whack the competition in their face.

©Entrepreneur April 2011

Tags:
BlackBerry, Torch 9800 Slider