By 

A. G. Lawson “Jarvichi” (Somerset, UK) –

  

I don’t consider myself to be a ‘fanboy’, albeit I have previously owned a Blackberry Pearl and an 8900. My last phone was a HTC Desire, which was very pretty, good at everything multimedia, web browsing was superb with Flash support, etc.

My problem with the Desire was that it simply didn’t “Work” like Blackberrys, what I mean is that when I turn on my Blackberry it will synchronise with my POP email account, Facebook, and SMS, and then will immediately notify me whenever I get a new message, until I turn the phone off again. The Desire doesn’t do this, it instead will go and check for updates at a defined interval, which in my opinion isn’t very efficient. The benefit is that Blackberrys use push notifications, meaning that your phone gets told when there is an update.

The Torch is RIMs attempt at competing with the iPhone and influx of Android phones. At the end of the day the technical specification of the Torch is not comparable to the iPhone or average Android, the screen is a lower resolution, the camera isn’t as good, the processor is slower, and there isn’t as much memory; but, none of that really matters, because the hardware differences are essentially superficial, what matters is that the phone does what you want it to do, the fact is that it is good at being a communications device…

When you turn your phone on for the first time the set up wizard asks you a couple of questions and within a minute or two emails start to arrive in your mailbox. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube are all there ready for you to use. A quick search in App World gets you eBay, and a quick web search will get you Google Mobile (Maps, Sync, GMail, and more). I use Google to store my contacts, Google Sync is great for storing and retrieving my list of names and numbers. Soon RIM are going to release ‘Blackberry Protect’ which will fulfil this same function, you will be able to back up your device remotely and find where it is via the Blackberry Protect website (I have beta tested this app on the 8900, and it is amazing).

The touch screen is responsive, and looks very nice indeed (that fact that it has less pixels than other popular phones doesn’t really matter – my eyesight simply isn’t good enough to make out the individual pixels), the on-screen keyboard works well, the hardware keyboard is perfect. The touch pad takes some getting used to, I ended up making mine less sensitive in the settings.

Wifi N works well, making FREE calls across the UMA network is always a nice feature to have, if you end up anywhere without signal but do have Wifi access you can still call and text without any problem.

OS6 is nice, it doesn’t try be pretentious and pretty like Android does, a simple clearly laid out home screen which is uncluttered, swipe left or right to scroll through the new category views, context sensitive menus based on whatever you click, and a wonderful help option for everything. There are a few bugs that I expect RIM to be fixing very soon; The YouTube up-loader always fails, for instance.

The media player is as good as any iPod interface, and sound through headphones is good. I’m not entirely sure about video, I’m using the same micro sd as I had in my HTC, and videos shot on the HTC won’t play even though they have the same file extension as those filmed on the Blackberry (The HTC does play Blackberry videos though?!?). Wireless music sync takes a bit of setting up – install the latest desktop software and the appropriate app on the phone, whilst you computer is on your phone will list you media, select teh albums you want on your phone and they’ll download for you to listen to later on.

Pictures are organised well, can be sorted into folders, the camera is 5 mega pixels and isn’t great in low light – daylight shots are great. The inbuilt file manager allows for all sorts of things to be done.

The device lacks any good games, a simple brick breaker game, and Wordmole (word search style game). I would have though a card game could have been included.

Blackberry Messenger is brilliant, you can message any Blackberry owner for free, share pictures, videos, sounds, calender, task lists, all with ease. Blackberry messenger can also be used to send text messages to non Blackberry contacts. The email client works well, in fact most of the email functionality is in line with any PC email client, although it does lack Junk mail filtering (Which is a shame).

The web browser isn’t perfect, it lacks Flash support and is a bit sluggish, I suspect that RIM will be working on these issues.

My favourite bit about the Blackberry is the settings, there simply are so many things you can tweak, for instance you can change the default currency icon, lock screen message, theme, wallpaper and ringtone, all with a few clicks around the well organised and endless list of options.

The keyboard…

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