The Blackberry Torch 9800 is this brand's latest attempt at creating a quality touchscreen phone. While it indeed creates a lot to drool over, its steep price tag, screen related flaws, and overcomplicated user interface makes it difficult to use. Many users will find themselves excited over its many features, but this is definitely a phone that designers can learn from in terms of functionality.
After all, if the phone is difficult to use, all the flashy apps and features in the world won't improve it. At first glance, the Torch is certainly a nice looking phone. We like its chrome accents and streamlined curves. As always, its QWERTY keyboard is nicely defined, making it easy to type out texts and emails.
In addition to this, you'll find its sliding mechanism feels sturdy and smooth. Fans of thinner phones may frown at its 161g frame, and we admit it does feel a bit bulky and clumsy to hold. Alas, its screen is mostly a disappointment. At 3.2 inches, it's quite large, though there are larger ones.
What makes it a true letdown is its low resolution. While it's readable, it's not much in comparison to an iPhone, for example. It's also not very responsive. While the phone's trackpad makes up for this somewhat, we were disappointed at just how much effort it took to simply make the phone respond.
The BlackBerry Torch 9800 is a promising phone with good features that could compete with today's latest. BlackBerry hasn't lost the mobilephone market yet and they also have lots of mobile phone deals that might change your mind when buying the phone you have in mind.
It is a good concept to combine the touch screen feature and the QWERTY keyboard, but it can be a bit hard for first-time users to navigate through both. Nevertheless, the improvements on the OS 6 upgrade are something to look forward to. This Torch 9800 can be the “best Blackberry ever”, with the capacitive touch screen and the improved OS 6, but that would be up to the consumer market to decide.
TumugonBurahin[Samantha Cole]