TORCH 9800 FIRST WEEK REVIEW
Unless you have been living under a rock (or an iPhone 4) for the past week, you very well know that Research In Motion released their new OS6 on their new device the Torch 9800 on August 12th. Some of you may not have had the chance to own/play with one of these yet because you don’t have AT&T. Worry not though, Rogers Wireless and supposedly sprint will have them soon (Novemberish….) This review will break down a few of the new features that OS6 has as well as the Torch including webkit browser, social feeds, connections menu, interactive tool tray, universal search,virtual keyboard, QWERTY physical keyboard, media player, battery life and updated specifications of the device.
- WEBKIT BROWSER
The new webkit browser is the corner-stone of the new OS6. Users will find it as a breath of fresh air from the moment they open the browser. You will find “Bookmarks,” and “History” underneath the address bar for easy access to your favorite sites and your history. To the right of the address bar you will find a tab’s option that opens multiple tabs so you can have multiple sites open at once. Scrolling back and forth on these tabs is very smooth and sensitive to the touch. Most of the websites that the browser opens are mobile sites, but clicking on a web pages “full site” will render very quickly and fit perfectly to the screen. That means no more frantically using your track pad to navigate on the page. The webkit browser also uses an auto text focus feature and text wrapping to make reading script on a page extremely easy to the reader. Webkit over wifi is extremely fast, and easily keeps up with the iphone 4 or any of the droids running 2.0. Webkit over 3G is faster in my opinion than over wifi because sometimes the signal strength you are getting from the connection is sub par. Rest assured berry users you will get the smartphone web browsing experience you deserve from the webkit.
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- SOCIAL FEEDS
If you are in to Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds, AIM, Myspace ect. Social Feeds are for you! The social feed application takes all of the social networking communication sites that you use and puts them all together in one handy app. The application lists every social feed you register with it in one drop down menu. You use the “filter” feature to just list one of the multiple social apps you use, to single it out among the others. That is not even the best part about it. You can click the BlackBerry button and chose to “post” to however many of the social sites you use all at one time. I have mine personally set to, BBM, Twitter, Facebook and AIM. No other OS on any phone out there right now has this, but I am sure we will see clones at some point from the competition.
- CONNECTIONS MENU
Tired of going to your settings, and having to dig through multiple options to manage your connections? Well not any more. Click the clock on the top of the screen and a drop down menu will display your connection options (wifi, mobile network and bluetooth). That’s not all, you can also set your alarm clock from this menu as well. This feature saves countless hours of “option digging.”
- MAIN MENU TOOL TRAY
The tool tray on the new OS can be opened in a few different ways. You can swipe your finger up to expose the first for rows of your applications or even just one row. It’s up to you. Double tap it to collapse it or just drag it down with your finger. You can swipe your finger to the right or left to reveal 4 other trays those being (Frequent, Downloads, Media, and Favorites). This lay out organizes everything very easily and has good elasticity when moving it up and down and side to side.
- UNIVERSAL SEARCH
A new feature that people who are unfamiliar with is the “universal search” feature. This allows the user to search for anything and the device will pull all of its resources in order to produce multiple results. Say that you search a name such as “Matt” it will search your text messages, emails, bbms, phone book, calender ect. This feature is great if your looking for a particular email or calender event.
- VIRTUAL KEYBOARD/QWERTY
Whenever a phone company is releasing its first full touch screen keyboard (not sure press) a brow gets raised. I wasn’t sure how well the virtual keyboard would react to typing, considering I have owned multiple iphones as well in the past and Apple’s virtual keyboards are in the top of their class. Well move over iphone, here comes the Torch’s virtual keyboard and it is awesome. In the vertical position it is very easy to type and the keys are not cramped at all. When you flip the phone sideways, the movement between vertical and landscape keyboard is fast and instant, no delay what so ever. Hold your finger on the “!?123” key and it will num lock the keyboard for you. Hold your finger on the shift key and it will cap lock the board for you. You will also find the send key that looks like a flying speech bubble. It’s very close in relation to the keys so your thumb doesn’t have to go hunting for the send key at the top of the screen. Slide your finger down over the keyboard it will make it disappear like magic so you can read more text from your screen. RIM did an excellent job with the virtual keyboard. The physical QWERTY is an exact mold of the 9700‘s keyboard, so if you need to bang out long emails, slide the keyboard down and it is right there. It feels very solid and is backlit for typing in dark rooms or at night. The keypads space is not cramped what so ever. I have average sized hands and it fits me well.
- MEDIA PLAYER
Revamped and ready to go, the new media player puts a fresh new look to the way we watch, listen and view our media. A cool feature is that is uses the album art work in a “cover flow” format similar to apples. The flow through the covers is very smooth and has no lag what so ever. Best part about the media feature on this phone is wireless syncing to your itunes library! So get a 32G Micro SD like mine add the 4G that comes with the phone internally and you have 36G’s to store music and movies…. iphone whats up!
- BATTERY LIFE
Short and sweet, this battery lasts very long. I usually go two days without charging it. I can run multiple apps, make a lot of calls, send a lot of emails and still have a ton of battery life. I have heard of a few people having severe battery drainage problems but not many. This to me suggests a faulty battery and the device should be returned for an exchange of a new one ASAP. Other than that people have reported great battery life.
- TORCH 9800 SPECS
For detailed spec’s visit this link:
http://na.blackberry.com/eng/devices/blackberrytorch/torch_specifications.jsp
- FINAL THOUGHTS
Over all RIM did a very good job with this phone. I realize that the internals of this phone could have been jacked up like a 1ghz processor and an HD screen, but this phone didn’t need those things to do what it needs to do. Everything is fluid with the touch screen, whether it be typing , scrolling through web pages or opening menus. The Torch is one of the greatest devices I have ever saw or used, and I know if you like BlackBerry, you will absolutely love the 9800.