Apple may still have an iPhone exclusive with AT&T in the US, but its great rival Research in Motion (RIM) is able to play fast and loose with both sides of the US cellular market, and having made up the core top end offerings of Verizon for the past few years, it has now landed a deal for AT&T to debut its new operating system on the brand new Blackberry Torch handset. It’s probably just as well, because Android devices are becoming the staple diet of Verizon customers these days and last quarter the collective power of Android Smart phones outshone RIM for the first time.
The new device has tried to grab the best from all worlds, it has a traditional qwerty keyboard, which RIM is famous for, something it shied away from in all the fuss to follow Apple’s touch screen lead, when it introduced the Storm. But this time it has turned the keyboard into a slider, a form factor now pretty much ignored by other handset vendors.
The design of the day for the Android camp has been a side slider, but the reason for that is because no-one seems to be able to make a candy-bar Qwerty keyboard like RIM and needs the increased area of the side slider to get one that works well enough. As a conventional slider it means RIM can offer both a touch screen phone, and its usual strength in physical Qwerty keyboards. Of course it also has a capacitive touchscreen keyboard if you prefer.
The device comes with the new BlackBerry 6 OS, and the device is exclusive to AT&T, though we don’t know for how long. It is also called the BlackBerry 9800 and the two companies were quick to remind the world that the first ever Blackberry launched on AT&T and that some form of Blackberry has been available there throughout the iPhone years.
The Torch comes with a new user interface, a new Webkit browser with gesture commands built in, and a new operating system which is more or less the old system slightly upgraded and ready to accommodate both the touch screen and a new trackpad. It does include slightly stronger messaging capabilities and more deeply embedded links to social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace as well as a dedicated YouTube app.
No smart phone is really complete these days without access to an app library of sorts so the new OS has direct access pre-loaded to the BlackBerry App World. The OS features universal search on the home screen to search through email, messages, contacts, music, videos and more on the smartphone, and BlackBerry App World.
The announcement made great play of this being the first phone to support AT&T’s next-generation messaging experience, which includes group messaging with ‘reply all’ function for up to 10 contacts and which can include location data.
There are pre-loaded icons for a variety of entertainment apps including Bloomberg, ESPN, The Weather Channel and Slacker Radio and AT&T’s Web Video Search, a new app which searches video content from over 70 major Internet video websites.
The hardware features of this device really are being questioned by analysts out there. It is heavy, the screen resolution is poor, and battery life is unlikely to be enough and the processing power is not that far above the Palm Pre, which never set the world alight. The device weighs in at 161 grams, heavier than the iPhone 4; has a 3.2 inch 360 x 480 display, an optical trackpad, a less than stellar 624 Mhz processor (when compared with the 1GHz monsters out there) and comes with just 4 GB of in built memory, although you can add another 32 GB through microSD slots. AT&T is offering two data plans, one at $15 a month for 200 MB of wireless data or $25 for 2 GB and there will be a batch of enterprise deals out soon.
It comes with a creditable 5 MP camera with flash, but records video in only 640 x 480 resolution. Yes, it has GPS and Wi-Fi and a 3.5mm stereo headset jack, but so does every other smart phone out there. And of course it is 3G and works with HSDPA
With the pricing at $199 and going on sale on August 12 at AT&T stores Best Buy, Wal-Mart and RadioShack and the RIM website, it may be a tad overpriced for what it is, though we suspect that Blackberry’s are the new Black, and that younger clientele in the US who have so far resisted the drift to the iPhone, may come to love it.