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Recently, I had the opportunity to spend some time with the new Blackberry Torch. Considering that the only reason you would not have heard about this phone is that you have been living under a rock or possibly in a missile silo, I’ll skip what the phone is and the like.
[SinglePic not found]As we all know by now, the Torch is being heavily flaunted by AT&T as the “next best thing”. In my limited times with it, I have to say that it certainly is not the next best thing, it’s not even the fourth or fifth best thing. RIM really dropped the ball on this one. I guess that’s what happens when your Co-CEO stops paying attention and tries to buy a hockey team.
Blackberry OS 6 is certainly a step up from previous iterations, this is most certainly for sure. Problem is, in certain areas it seems like RIM took a couple steps back. I think my biggest gripe thus far is the fact that everything is menu based. You can pull up the menus to access all of your applications and that’s great. Problem is, why the hell do I need to pull up menus if there cannot be anything on my desktop to begin with? The entire point of an app drawer in Android is to view and access applications you have no space for or don’t care enough to put on your desktops. This makes the entire experience incredibly confusing. Often times I’ve found myself trying to scroll through desktops Android-style only to remember that there is no such thing and I have to drag up the menus. Stupid is one way to say it.
Aside from this odd choice by RIM, everything is laid out pretty well. The new notification bar at the top is very nice and integrated search has certainly come a long way. Apps are grouped into type pretty well and you have the ability to throw the ones you use most often into a favorites category. Media has been updated and for the better, everything is a bit easier to access and feels more intuitive.
The hardware itself is awkward to say the least. With the keyboard flipped out, I felt like if I didn’t have a deathgrip on the phone, it would tumble out of my hands because of how top-heavy the thing is. The top-heaviness makes sense when you realize that instead of using a keyboard that feels good to type like with the Bold 9000 for example, RIM has opted to cut corners and use a keyboard so cheap and plastic feeling that I’d rather type on the on-screen keyboard, which is a MASSIVE improvement from the OS used on the Storm and Storm2. Come to think of it SurePress, to the delight of all mankind, has been eliminated.
Overall, the Torch feels rushed. It has the potential and just couldn’t deliver. I’ll continue playing with the device and perhaps write a full review in the coming days.