Posts tagged BlackBerry

At a rather grand press conference held in Mumbai on October 14, BlackBerry officially released their high-end smartphone, the BlackBerry Torch 9800. It is the same sliding touchscreen handset we saw AT&T release in the US on August 3 this year.  And now it is here in India almost a month-and-a-half after its western region premiere. However, the Torch 9800 has been selling in the grey market in offline stores as well as online retailers, like eBay India, since long. Anyway, without further ado we bring all you BlackBerry boys (and girls) a sneak peak at what to expect from the Torch 9800.

Design and Build

This is BlackBerry’s first sliding phone. Until now, BlackBerry had an array of candy-bar models featuring a hardware keyboard. Then there was the Storm series, which was all touchscreen but different as it incorporated BlackBerry’s SurePress technology. If you aren’t familiar with SurePress, here’s a history lesson. Blackberry wanted to give people the big viewing area of a touchscreen combined with the click-ability of an actual keyboard.

The Storm 1 employed a rather weird system where the entire screen was like a giant button, but it didn’t work to RIM’s expectation. Honestly, it kind of blew. So they came up with a better version involving piezo electric sensors at four corners of the screen on the Storm 2. While it definitely made typing better than the original Storm, this system too didn’t really click with the masses.

This is why RIM realized that they couldn’t simply do away with the hardware keyboard, which according to a recent survey was one of the three reasons why people purchased a BlackBerry. But then the bigger viewing space on a touchscreen is no match for those seemingly tiny 2.4-inch screens on a regular Berry.
The Torch tries to address this issue by including a sliding QWERTY. The 3.2 inch, 480 x 360 pixel display is very similar in terms of visibility to the Storm models (it might even be the exact same panel), but without than clicking screen thingy. The screen is capacitive and its resolution, while slightly higher than first-gen iPhone and Android models, is far less than an iPhone 4 or a Samsung Galaxy S. So, while it’s not the best in crispness, viewing the screen is still a fairly pleasurable affair. Underneath the screen are five elements typically found on the Curve/Bold series phones; the call answer/end keys, the menu and back keys and the optical track-pad. Since you have a touchscreen, it is technically possible to use the phone without the trackpad altogether, but it may come in handy, to say, navigate the mouse pointer in a web browser.

The keyboard is an exact replica of the BlackBerry Bold 9700. Personally, in my experience, the older Bold 9000′s wider keyboard was the best QWERTY I’ve used on a phone. But it appears as if some people weren’t happy with its chubbiness, thus making RIM to create a successor with a smaller body (that cramped the keyboard and the display in the process). The keys are slightly recessed due to the sliding mechanism. After test typing on it for a few minutes, I wasn’t entirely convinced about it. It is alright to type on, the tactility is fine but my fat thumbs sometimes just found the keys to be a little too small for my liking. Ironically, the redesigned on-screen QWERTY keyboard quite a breeze to type on.

The build quality is typically good like all BlackBerrys, and the sliding mechanism seemed fine as well. As for size, this phone is nowhere as slender as the new iPhone or the Samsung Galaxy S (or even Deepika Padukone, the Indian actress who inaugurated its launch). It’s quite a handful when you flick the keyboard out.

User Interface and Performance

The Torch 9800 is a significant launch for RIM because it is their first phone to sport BlackBerry’s latest OS 6. After seeing slick user interfaces on the iPhone or even recent Android models, the BlackBerry OS 5 UI felt dated and not optimized in comparison. OS 6 brings a redesigned look, with the home-screen now having many logical click points. For instance, the top bar underneath the time/date indicates incoming alerts for new e-mail, SMS or Social Networking/Instant Messaging.

By simply tapping that bar, you are presented with a chronologically arranged dropdown menu, where you can quickly take a peek at what you’ve received. Another tab opens up the respective application. There’s also a universal search button to the top right; it searches for anything and everything on your phone as soon as you start typing the first few letters. Again, the implementation is similar to the iOS or Android’s search box.

The main menu is also better organized with three levels of views. Slightly flicking the bottom shows you the first level of apps. The menu also swipes sideways, bringing up different types of sorting like ‘Frequently used’, ‘Downloads’ and ‘Favorites’. OS 6 also has a new Webkit-based browser, which is the same rendering engine used by Apple’s Safari browser on the iPhone and the Google Android browser. This was a much needed change, since the last iteration of the BlackBerry browser wasn’t up to the mark when it came to rendering full-fledged websites. We fired up Techtree.com and it showed up just perfectly. Multi-tabbed browsing is also visual now, thus making switching between tabs easier. Multi-touch gestures like pinch to zoom and scrolling through menus wasn’t buttery smooth, but fairly workable.

In terms of speed, we felt the device’s 624 MHz processor was trying hard to keep things running swift, as it wasn’t silky smooth as competitive mobile OSes (you know by now which ones we’re hinting at). This was apparent especially when you had multiple tabs open in the browser and were juggling through different apps.

The 5 megapixel autofocus camera at the back takes decent snaps. The presence of the LED flash helped since the demo units were kept in a fairly low-lit area. There’s a dedicated two-stage camera shutter button, which in our opinion gives better precision than having to tap a virtual button on the screen. There’s geo-tagging of photos and they can be sorted in a variety of ways in the picture viewer app. It is unfortunate that when all high-end models are going HD (1280 x 720 pixel resolution) these days, the Torch 9800 still records video in just VGA (640 x 480 pixel) resolution.

Although it wouldn’t be too much to ask for HD video playback, it is at least nice to know that the Torch 9800 supports standard-def DivX/XviD format playback. Let’s hope it works as stated; as it is nicer to simply drag and drop videos from your computer onto the phone without converting/downscaling it first. To point out another possible flaw that is present in all BlackBerrys, the 3.5mm earphone jack is placed to the right hand side and not the top. Thus, if you’re using any third party earphones, the jack would protrude sideways when you try and put the phone in your pocket.

A positive outcome of lower specifications like the 624 MHz processor (instead of 1GHz on competitors) and a comparatively lower resolution screen is that the battery life should ideally work in Torch 9800′s favor. We’ll see how good it is when we test it out completely in the weeks to follow.

The big shocker was when somebody from the audience asked the price of the BlackBerry Torch 9800. It’s Rs. 33,249 – which initially does feel expensive. Deducing from our half-an-hour of usage and the specs, we feel other models in this price range are offering better value for money. The Torch 9800 should appeal to BlackBerry fans wanting the touchscreen-keyboard combination, but we feel there are better devices for that price outside of RIM land. We’ll reserve our judgments till we thoroughly scrutinize the phone and the OS 6 that BlackBerry keeps raving about.