BlackBerry Torch Overview

With only 2 decades of cellphones behind us it's tough to consult the legacy of the brand name and its products the way one might when speaking about an antique car. However, if we were to supply this concept to phones, then BlackBerry would surely have earned this honour. The BlackBerry Torch is much like a Rolls-Royce, it's beautifully built and it drives wonderful.

Design
An example of BlackBerry's strengths happens to be simply how much you can customise its devices. This really is probably through BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) - where the employer customises it in addition to little control - or BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), where one can change about you like. Indeed, when you're from an iPhone with a Blackberry, you realise exactly how closed Apple's technique are.But not you may have an excessive amount a good thing? The response is probably yes.For instance, changing the ringtone is straightforward enough, but customising profiles is usually an intense experience, with the amount of options just a power user is left grabbing the smelling salts. Configuring ringtones, text alerts, MMS alerts, email alerts, Twitter, Facebook, the browser, IM, BBM etc gets confusing if you realise just many options you may have, so you find yourself stopping halfway through.One huge omission is made out of the Torch. If we opened the box, we were happy about the various accessories (including standard BlackBerry international chargers), but where was the case? Close inspection revealed that this phone doesn't feature one, which we find unforgivable.BlackBerry has bundled one with nearly every phone it's made in the last few years and there's a cause for the - not only do the holders protect the phone from bumps, additionally, they automatically shut off the screen and hang the phone into standby, helping the battery last even longer. If the phone is at your pocket or bag, it prevents you accidentally dialling a message.

Keyboards
The full QWERTY keyboard is sacrificed somewhat to accommodate this radically different form factor, and we'd need to agree. Alongside with the Blackberry bold 9700, the Torch's keyboard is noticeably (if marginally) slimmer, with less width to express each of their 35 individual buttons. Thankfully, there is also a virtual keyboard option, and between the two we haven't struggled an excessive amount of for getting our emails and SMS out.

Display
The screen on the Torch can be a not the same proposition; it is a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen, featuring a portrait orientation including a HVGA pixel resolution. It comes with a decent viewing angle on both the horizontal and vertical axis, but even more important the touch proponent is very responsive. Additionally, it contains a few key advantages for the BlackBerry faithful. It supports multi-touch, for instance, helping you to select a number of unwanted messages by touching the bottom and top of the list simultaneously then deleting them en masse.

Performance
With a 624-MHz processor and 512MB of RAM under the hood, the Torch has not got all the muscle as the latest 1-GHz Android phones or the A4 chip inside the iPhone 4. The device opened apps pretty quickly, but we saw the dreaded clock icon (which lets you know the device is working) quite a few times during our testing. With regards to storage goes, the Torch is sold with 4GB of installed memory (so you'll be getting lots of space for apps), along with a 4GB sd card for a total of 8GB. You'll be able to expand that with a total of 32GB.

Camera and Camcorder
The most the phone remains just like the 9700, that has a 5-megapixel camera and LED flash on the back, a 3.5mm headphone socket (this time on the right as opposed to the left), the same duo of handset lock and mute buttons on top, including a sd card alongside the SIM under the battery cover.

Music and Video
RIM has graced its music player that has a Cover Flow-like makeover, making album art more prominent. The presentation looks slicker, and even sync your collection over Wi-Fi that has a desktop PC using the Remote Media Sync feature. Additionally you can register for sets from NPR and The Onion to Crackberry.com in the Podcast app. On the video front, the YouTube app is simply redirect to the mobile site, but we found the playback to become adequate after we ecstatic theTron: Legacy trailer.

Call Quality
As with most BlackBerry devices, the Torch delivered clear and reliable call quality in New york city and Nj-new jersey. When reaching calls on the street (with background noise) we wished there were a lot more volume on our end of the line, but overall other callers preferred the sound in our voice on this phone to the iPhone 4. Plus, the Torch contains a superior speaker, turning it into a greater option for conference calls (not to mention GPS and music).

Battery life
The Torch also lasted longer over a charge than the iPhone 4. After unplugging the device at 1 p.m. then using the phone pretty heavily throughout the most the day for navigation, web surfing, streaming Slacker, and capturing, we still stood a quarter of the battery life remaining by 8 p.m. The Torch contains a rated talk time of 5.5 hours including a standby duration of 17 days.