Finally, an actual BlackBerry based on the 6.0 operating system, which Co-Chief Executive Officer Jim Balsillie promised last month will have consumers “blown away”.
BlackBerry Torch 9800 with 6.0 Operating System.
Bloomberg’s Rich Jaroslovsky summarises the smartphone maker scene succintly at the beginning of his weekly Friday column:
“It’s become fashionable among the digerati to dismiss the BlackBerry as a remnant of yesterday’s technology and lump its maker, Research In Motion Ltd., with Microsoft and Nokia as wireless pioneers who squandered their early advantages and are now sinking toward irrelevance.”
Rich’s assessment for the Torch is that although it provides BlackBerry users with a more modern experience, “it falls well short of Apple Inc.’s iPhone and the many devices that run Google Inc.’s Android operating system, and provides no reason for users of any of those phones to contemplate switching.”
RIM’s application store, called AppWorld, has only about 9,000 offerings, a small fraction of the number available for the iPhone or Android devices. And the BlackBerry’s media-playing capabilities remain basic, even primitive, when compared with some of its rivals.
Sporting the classic BlackBerry form factor, the Torch weighs 161 grams (5.7 ounces) – 18 percent heavier than an iPhone 4.
Typing can be done using either the physical keyboard, which slides out from behind the screen, or by using the on-screen keypad. The 3.2 inch colour touch screen recognises the usual pinch-and-zoom gestures to resize text and images, and you can move from message to message by swiping the screen sideways.
The new interface for the new operating system will also be available to users of BlackBerry’s Bold 9700 and 9650 and Pearl 3G models. Rich reports that “the home screen is well laid out, with a separate screen for frequently used applications; settings and options have been made simpler across the board.”
The biggest improvement seems to be in web-surfing, considering how painful it had been on older BlackBerry models. The browser has been revamped to be faster and to include new features.
Tags: BlackBerry, RIM, smartphone
[…] BlackBerry Torch was the first smartphone from Research In Motion (RIM) that shipped with the new BlackBerry OS 6. It has a completely new keyboard implementation – instead of having the physical keyboard […]