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BlackBerry 9800 

The BlackBerry 9800 Torch is slick. It is about the same size as a 9650 Bold, perhaps a little thicker. RIM has always done a good job designing and manufacturing hardware, and the 9800 Torch looks to be no different. It feels solid in the hand and well built, with good materials.

9800 Torch  

The Torch has a 3.2-inch capacitive touch display that was responsive, though I found the 480 x 360 resolution to be a bit disappointing. RIM's competition — i.e., Motorola, HTC, Apple — is firing off HD displays with 800 x 480 pixels left and right. RIM needs to step up the display tech.

There are four physical keys underneath the display (Send, BlackBerry, Back, End), and an optical trackpad in between for on-screen navigation. The trackpad worked well, as did each of the buttons.

There are but two buttons on the right side of the device, one for the camera and a second for the volume controls. The were not awesome. The camera button, in particular, requires the user to press it way down into the side of the device. Way too much action. There are also the two now-familiar silence and lock keys built into the top edge of the 9800. They work fine. There are no buttons on the left or bottom edges of the 9800. The microUSB hatch for charging and data transfer is on the left.

The slider mechanism is solid, though sliding it open with your thumb is a pain in the butt. There isn't a good "catch" for your thumb to hold onto to help provide leverage when opening it. According to RIM, the 9800's screen won't react to your thumb if the slider is being opened, though I was unable to see that for myself. Once open, you have access to the full QWERTY keyboard.

The keyboard is excellent. I'd rate it one of the better keyboards from RIM in recent memory. The additional real estate provided by the slider form factor gave RIM a little extra breathing room. It put that extra space to good use when designing the keyboard.

I am generally don't like vertical slider phones. RIM has done as good a job as it can with the 9800. The hardware is top-notch. Nothing about it felt cheap or under-designed. Those who like the idea of a touch screen but still need that physical keyboard should be happy enough.

Here is a video tour of the 9800 and BlackBerry 6.

BlackBerry 6 

BlackBerry OS 6  

The biggest news from RIM today isn't the BlackBerry 9800 Torch, but the first real release of BlackBerry 6, its newly revised operating system. How did RIM do?

The first thing you'll notice about BB6 is that it is a lot more finger friendly that BB5.x was on the Storm/Storm2. It is vastly re-done, with larger buttons, big icons, and swollen everything. The simple act of making the user interface elements larger and easier to interact with goes a long way to helping the OS become more usable.

The main home screen looks similar to that of the Storm/Storm2, but there's a lot more going on. First you'll notice the notification bar just under the battery, signal, and other indicators. Similar to the way the notification share works on Android, this bar hols all your alerts — new emails, BBMs, text messages, missed calls, etc. Tap it, and it drops down to show you the details about those alerts. If you want to ignore them, just tap again. You want to interact with them, select the message that interests you.

There is also a small app drawer at the bottom that has 4 apps. This is user customizable. Tap it and it expands to show all the apps on the device. Whether this drawer is open or closed, you can swipe it left or right to get at more apps and shortcuts. This borrows heavily from Android and webOS. These two changes alone make the user interface vastly more usable that it was on the Storm/Storm2.

Borrowing another element from Android, if you press and hold an application (or contact) on the home screen, a secondary menu appears that lets you take further actions, such as moving the app icon around, deleting it, opening it, etc.

The one feature that RIM seems most pleased with is the universal search function. Start typing anything (from the home screen) and BB6 automatically starts to scan the device for whatever is typed. If it can't find it, the tool provides links to Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google, etc. Universal Search can be set to scan most anything on the device, including contacts, media, apps, shortcuts and so on. Let's say you search for Bob. It will show you Bob's contact file in the results. Press that and you'll see a range of actions right under your thumb (calling, texting, emailing, etc.).

RIM has refreshed the settings menu (THANK GOD!), and now rather than stark, drab, black-on-white menu lists, there are more icons, descriptions, and items have been lumped under fewer categories, which means there is less scrolling up and down. That's a good thing.

RIM has created its own social networking application. Similar to the way other social networking apps work, it aggregates all the status update content from Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and other sources into a single place on the phone.

The media apps have all been updated, though less significantly than the home screen has. The basic appearance is very similar, but animations are smooth, menus fly by quickly, and everything is more colorful.

In all, BB6 is the most usable operating system developed by Research In Motion. The one problem is that it forges no new ground. Apple, Google, Microsoft and Palm have all tread this ground already. While it is great that RIM has made the OS better all around, it really only catches up to the competition (just barely), rather than surpassing it. RIM will need to stay on its toes and see what it can do to adapt as its competitors do in the coming years.

view article organized across multiple pages

Eric has been covering the mobile telecommunications industry for 17 years at various print and online publications. He studied at Rutgers Newark and University of Kentucky, and has a degree in writing. He likes playing guitar, attending concerts, listening to music, and driving sports cars.

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