Mention business and think of BlackBerry. Even in Malta we have come to associate the use of the BlackBerry range with busy executives and team members busy reading their e-mail and keeping constantly in touch with their office.
The BlackBerry Torch 9800 is one of the latest models launched by the Canadian company Research in Motion and it is now available in Malta.
First impressions count: the Torch is solid but with a relatively large “form factor”. It looks a little bulky and heavy, not exactly meant to fit into a shirt pocket (but good for trouser pockets).
This could be the price to pay for the fact that the Torch is a slider phone, the first BlackBerry with such a feature. When you open the slide to access the physical keyboard, the phone becomes a 15 cm-high gadget. It takes a firm hand to handle but it gives users the option which smartphones without a physical keyboard do not.
However, despite the size, the keyboard is not large and it takes nimble fingers to master it.
The touchscreen’s feel is adequate and real estate is a 3.2-inch HVGA 480x360 light sensitive display which was comfortable enough to use. Colours are crisp, and text and images clear but overall it is inferior when compared to other smartphones.
The Torch comes with a 5-megapixel camera, 512 MB on-board memory with a 4 GB card included (expandable to 32 GB), built-in GPS with Blackberry maps, and WiFi that connects to the latest “n” standards.
One of the most important innovations in the Torch is the new BlackBerry OS 6. It has everything you need both while at work and for your lifestyle needs. The interface is nice and functional and the apps and features are not stacked in some dark corner thanks to the new navigation bar.
The search facility is good and customisation handy. The new browser, based on WebKit, is faster (though perhaps not as fast as in other smartphones) and the multimedia experience is good (though you can only shoot video in VGA). E-mail, perhaps the killer application for executives, is very efficient on this BlackBerry.
Like all BlackBerries, this smartphone suffers from the small app store available, unlike rival manufacturers which offer tens of thousands of apps both paid and free.
The operating system is good but it needs more power than that offered by the 624 MHz processor. Battery life is good.
The verdict: the Blackberry Torch 9800 is a workhorse that gets the job done and will not let you down.
The BlackBerry was made available for review by Vodafone Malta.