Review: BlackBerry Torch 9810

BlackBerry only recently announced a slew of new smartphones out of which the Bold-Touch 9900 already made its mark on the nation and now it’s the upgrade to the Torch. Nearly a year after the original Torch arrived in the market; RIM has revealed the Torch 2 — or 9810 as it is model-named.

From a design and form-factor point of view, the new 9810 is exactly like its predecessor. The build is just as solid, and as with the outgoing model, the new 9810 comes with almost the same set of standard features, too. If you’ve purchased the original Torch, then from the outside you’d find no change at all. The slide out QWERTY keypad is just as smooth, however, the keypad could have been just slightly more spread out to optimize typing. As is though, it’s not too bad. Probably the only thing that may give the phone away would be its new colour scheme: shiny silver instead of the gunmetal grey finish.

It’s still just a little on the heavy-set side at 161g and the rubberized sides do allow you to get a good grip on it. As usual the bundled handsfree and cables provided are still as good as they come. The inclusion of a smart case would have been brilliant or a memory card (hot-swap) for that matter but considering the internal storage has been beefed up to 8GB now, the latter point is quite mute. It never really was too hard on the eyes and the new jazzed up color combo adds a bit of elegance to the overall appearance. The 3.2-inch screen gets a decent bump in resolution as well, and it now runs at 480 x 640 pixels.

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All new color makes it quite easy on the eyes

Features and Performance
While the exteriors might be the same there are a few very good changes on the inside–most important among them being the processor. With the inclusion of a 1.2GHz CPU, the 9810 can now play toe-to-toe with the fastest smartphones available in the market. This change along with OS 7.0 makes for a superb browsing and in-app experience. The phone responds and moves from task to task without any effort - screen renders are instantaneous. Browsing especially gets a huge shot in the arm, and we think even the fastest Android phones may struggle to keep up.

Media capabilities are still quite up there with the best, though the lack of 1080p video playback capabilities might be considered a drawback by some. It supports XviD and DivX codecs and plays most file formats except FLV and MKV. Music playback, thanks to the audio engine’s Audio Boost and EQ presets worked out just as well as any of RIM’s other offerings and the bundled handsfree proves to be quite comfortable and well-matched to the quality of output for both calls and music.

Although this device too, is equipped with a GPS module, you’ll still have to contend with BlackBerry Maps that will show you placed in the middle of an empty screen for Indian residents. The only other option is Google Maps or paying for a third party software.

_To read more of BlackBerry Torch 9810 review, head on over to tech2.com_