BlackBerry Torch 9800

My old and faithful BlackBerry Curve 8900 gave up the ghost a week ago. My fault. I have been dropping it on a concrete floor too many times. It was in a really poor physical condition. But such is a life of gadgets being used on continuous basis.

So time for a new one. Two years since I last shopped for a mobile phone. I have build a checklist of must - haves. Ended up with a short one - just two items:

• Support for UMA (connecting to the mobile network via WiFi). It is a must have for me, as where I live, there is no coverage. So I can either sit on top of the roof (which is difficult and not an option in Winter), use a femtocell (none of the MNOs in Poland offers them yet) or use UMA to tunnel my cellphone calls via my private WiFi and DSL line.
  More on UMA for techies on my tech.slupik.com blog.
  
• WebKit - based Web Browser. WebKit is the best Web rendering technology on the market. It is a foundation for many top - performing browsers, including the Chrome, Safari, Android and others. As of today, WebKit browsers provide the best Web experience on mobile devices.

How surprised I was when I learned there is just ONE device that has both UMA and WebKit. The BlackBerry Torch 9800. Decision making is pretty easy once your requirements are precise. I called Orange - my MNO, to double check the Torch will work over UMA with their network (the Curve was doing that for two years, but to double check). They said no such phone as Torch 9800 existed. So I was on my own. Browsed some online auctions and finally decided to buy one from the Expansys.COM. It arrived in two days.

As I had never had the Torch in my hand before, I was wondering how much of a brick it it would be. What was my surprise to see it was just a tad bigger than the Curve (see the pictures below). Of course the screen estate is much bigger (although the resolution is the same - 480x360). The Torch is heavier. There is simply more inside. The slider keyboard. The touch screen. 3G. 512 MB RAM (yes! half a gigabyte!). Those are the main hardware changes. The battery is more or less the same. I was not happy about it. The Curve was doing 2 days on a charge. With the more capable hardware and much bigger display, I was afraid it would not last a day. But it appears RIM did a marvelous job in terms of power consumption. On a very mobile busy day - web browsing, calls, tweets, emails, all mainly on 3G or Wifi (everything turned on all the time), it still had 29% left in the evening. So yes, it has to be charged every night. But it easily lasts a full busy day. And the charging process is very fast. About an hour.

The Torch has a mix of probably all input interfaces humans ever invented. So there is the capacitive touch screen. Very precise, with pinch to zoom. And with a touch keyboard. The virtual keyboard can be configured to be full or multitap in portrait view and always is full QWERTY in landscape view. The physical keyboard is good, but not perfect. I like it, but it seems I would like it even more if it extended from the side of the device, not from the bottom. And then there is the absolutely fabulous, even magical (as Apple would say), thumb touch optical sensor. It replaces the old mechanical trackballs used in previous BlackBerries. It works simply fantastic. The most precise and intuitive mobile input interface I have ever had. For many, the thumb sensor may be the reason the try the BlackBerry. In my opinion it is by far the best mobile phone navigation device.

And then there is the software, of course. The Torch is the first BlackBerry phone running the new 6.0 OS. There are many changes and enhancements. I am not ready yet to judge the details. The jump has been big for me. The new OS, the touchscreen slider form factor. It feels very fast. The processor is not the fastest (624MHz), but probably the 512 MB of RAM provides plenty of room for applications. Note it is twice the amount of RAM in the iPad. Good move, RIM!

I can definitely comment on the Web Browser. It is light years ahead of the old BlackBerry browsers. The acquisition of the Torch Mobile (now you know why the 9800 is called the Torch), the leader in WebKit implementation, pays off in a big way. It is lightning fast. I did some non scientific tests, comparing load times on the Torch with the iPad. And they go head to head, with the Torch having even some advantage. Taking into account the Torch has much slower processor than the iPad (624MHz vs 1GHz), the Web loading and rendering speed is a significant achievement. May be the BlackBerry backend servers help here somehow - I don't know. But the end result is fare above my expectations.

The browser also handles multiple tabs in a very nice fashion. Navigating through the tabs reminds me somehow navigating the iTunes albums. And thanks to the loads of memory, there are many tabs you can leave opened. Very nice again.

The downsides? Not many with the phone itself. I don't know how sturdy the keyboard slider mechanism is. Not willing to try dropping it on concrete at the moment... Will see over time.

There is however one issue, RIM did really bad. It is the PC companion software, the BlackBerry Desktop Manager. Version 6.0. I installed it on my Nokia laptop. It crashes instantly on startup. The log says not enough memory (the Nokia has just 1 Gig). The RIM support says downgrade to 5.0. The 5.0 does not handle the Torch. Spinning in rounds. I installed it on my desktop 64-bit Windows 7. It runs, but says it will not synchronize to the Outlook 2010. "Contact Microsoft support to downgrade to Outlook 2007" they say. This feature is planned for 2011. I don't know how many billions of market cap companies like RIM lose by delivering crappy version of PC-companion software. But people must get really angry about it. I am pretty left in the cold right now. Hope they will fix it on my laptop - I have the Oultook 2007 there. But this really, really cracks on the otherwise shiny picture of the latest BlackBerry.