RIM BlackBerry Torch 9850 Review

Introduction:

Can you believe that it has been almost three years since the original BlackBerry Storm 9530 debuted? And that it was positioned to being an iPhone killer at the time? Crazy to believe it, but yes, it has been that long. A year later, RIM was gracious enough to follow it up with its successor, the Storm2 9550, which managed to iron out some of the kinks and issues with its predecessor – but still, it failed to be compete with its rivals. Interestingly enough, we thought that RIM’s desire to build an all touch smartphone died out last year when no successive device was announced, but it seems that RIM made use of the downtime.

Well, after close to two years of dormancy, RIM is about to unleash their third take on the all touchscreen form factor with the BlackBerry Torch 9850. Not messing around with any gimmicks, it seems that the Torch 9850 might be the actual one to finally end RIM’s losing streak in achieving success in this category. Some might say that the third time is a charm, right? However, is it just too late for it to finally make some headway?

The package contains:

• RIM BlackBerry Torch 9850
• microUSB cable
• Wall Charger
• Hands-free 3.5mm headphones

Design:

Initially, we thought the Torch 9850 to be inferior in quality and craftsmanship compared to the  two Storm smartphones. However, after getting a good feel for it, we’re accepting the totally new design approach that RIM is taking with the full touch BlackBerry. For starters, it’s a skinnier and more streamlined (0.45” thick) device, and at the same time, it’s by far the lightest (4.76 oz) out of the entire touch-only bunch. On top of that, we adore that the chrome trim sprinkles a bit of premium touch to a handset that’s constructed mostly out of glossy black plastic. Ultimately, it has an endearing design that’s able to drastically differentiate itself from RIM’s past offerings.



You can compare the RIM BlackBerry Torch 9850 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

Boasting the largest and highest resolution display to grace any BlackBerry smartphone thus far, we’re grateful to find a reasonable 3.7” WVGA (480 x 800) screen on the Torch 9850 – whereas the previous Storm units employed smaller 3.25” displays. Sharp is one way of calling it, but it’s nice to see plenty of distinctive details as well. Additionally, its high contrast allow colors to pop with enough iridescence to make our eyes drool. Granted that it’s not as alluring as Super AMOLED Plus displays, it’s nevertheless very attractive on the surface.


As much as we’re inclined to interact with its touchscreen more, the handset still employs that typical optical trackpad as an alternative and useful way of navigating. Regretfully, we’re not digging the very narrow looking volume rocker and shutter key that are clinging to the right side of the phone – they simply lack any distinguishable outlines.


Flipping it over,  the Torch 9850 is carrying a higher 5-megapixel auto-focus camera with a single LED flash. Removing the metallic back cover that’s covered in that soft touch matte material, we’re given access to its SIM card slot, microSD card slot, and 1,230 mAh battery.

Interface:

Thankfully, we’re finally able to let go of the terrible platform experience we endured when checking out the original Storm for the very first time, and even though it shares some fundamental characteristics, we’re undeniably more receptive with the new experience. Partly thanks to its significantly faster 1.2GHz processor with 768 MB of RAM, which blows away the 528MHz CPU of the Storm2 9550, the experience is much more inviting with its responsiveness. In fact, it clears out those frustrating memories of lockups and slowdowns that we found with the OS 4.7 experience on the original Storm. Looking back at it now, it’s clear that RIM learned from their past mistakes seeing that this is what the Storm should’ve offered when it was released – something that intuitive and quick to action with its response.

Naturally, we’re gladly accepting the evolutionary steps taken by the full touch BlackBerry, but at its core, the platform experience with OS 7 leaves us desiring for more. Specifically, it doesn’t quite come off as being exceptionally new since it bears a lot of elements with past versions of RIM’s mobile platform, which continues to be a heavy menu driven system. Although it executes things swimmingly, its use of a paneled layout with its homescreen isn’t anything new – and we’re sorely waiting for RIM to produce something with a little bit more originality.


Furthermore, it’s still keeping personalization limited to things like modifying the background wallpaper and placement of icons within the app panel. Yes, we totally agree that the experience is finally befitting for a full touch handset, however, it’s not doing the handset any justice by looking and feeling rather dated by today’s standards. 

Functionality:

Even though it’s packing the largest display to bless a BlackBerry, using its portrait keyboard can be challenging on most occasions due to its constricted layout. Not only are buttons tiny in size, but the narrow body of the handset doesn’t provide enough room to comfortably hold it while typing – albeit, it’s not a problem in landscape. In terms of response, it’s pretty quick with its movement and makes the whole process of inputting long passages of text very easy.  Still, we’re finding ourselves being on the cautious side of things when speed typing. Beyond that, we’re not fans of RIM’s implementation of highlighting text and placement of the cursor – but thankfully, the optical trackpad eases our worries with the latter.



What can we say about email on the Torch 9850? For starters, it’s what you’d expect out of any BlackBerry, which is a fantastic experience that caters to the needs to power users with push email support. As much as we adore its intuitive and straightforward nature, we’d still like to see some features like threaded conversations to organize things just a bit more. Anyhow, the extra real estate reduces the amount of scrolling needed to read emails.


Launching any of the Torch 9850 organizer apps, there are no major changes with any of them. With the Calendar app, we’re able to synchronize things from our Gmail and Facebook accounts, which are actually color-coded to better distinguish appointments. Besides being able to set alarms from within the Clock app, we’re also given access to other secondary apps like the stopwatch and timer. Additionally, there is an option to enable bedside mode, which allows the clock to be displayed while preventing incoming calls or messages from popping up. Some of the other organizer apps on board with the handset include the Calculator, MemoPad, Tasks, and Voice Notes Recorder.

Camera:

Well what do you know? There’s nothing different with the camera interface of the Torch 9850! Naturally, most of the layout is reserved for the viewfinder – with some finger-friendly sized buttons lining the bottom edge. Aside from the healthy amount of scene modes available, there is nothing else that’ll entice photo buffs.


In general, BlackBerries aren’t known for their photo taking abilities – and it shows why that trend continues with the Torch 9850. Flaunting a respectable 5-megapixel camera, shots might be good enough for a 4” x 6” printout, but we wouldn’t recommend trying to blow them up since it’s unable to capture any fine details with scenery shots. Even though it doesn’t happen all the time, shots can sometimes come out slightly over-exposed as well – thus, distorting its usually neutral color production. Scary to say, we wouldn’t want to be using it indoors or in low lighting since things are completely muddied down by various degrees of digital noise. Not surprisingly, the LED flash is able to fix it, but it generally leaves the shot looking over-exposed once again.


Although we find it passable, especially for something that’s recorded with a phone, the 720p video capture of the BlackBerry Torch 9850 exhibits some of the same qualities found with its still image results.  Meanwhile, there is an abundance of digital noise found with videos taken in low lighting. Despite those flaws, we dig that it consistently shoots at 30 frames per second, audio recording is clear & distortion-free, and that it offers continuous auto-focus to keep things looking sharp.

RIM BlackBerry Torch 9850 Sample Video:



RIM BlackBerry Torch 9850 Indoor Sample Video:



Multimedia:

At this point in the review, we’re getting a feel that very little has been done visually to OS 7 because the music player is unchanged as well. We do like its smooth looking coverflow-esque presentation, however, it would’ve been intricately useful to find some sort of mini-player, so we do not have to run the music player to execute any functions. Indubitably, its speaker isn’t the most boastful with its output, but we do like the neutral sounding tones that it emits, but more importantly, it doesn’t sound irritating at the highest volume setting.


Finally! We no longer need to cower in fear about ruining our eyes when watching videos for an extended period of time on a BlackBerry thanks to the large display of the Torch 9850. Playing the same movie trailer encoded in DivX, MPEG-4, and Xvid 1280 x 720 resolution, we’re enthralled by its smooth playback, luscious looking colors, and rich details. Honestly, this is the go-to BlackBerry if your primary concern is video watching.


Although it’s showing how much better it is than both Storms combined, there is one gripe we have with this “modernized” BlackBerry – it still lacks in the multimedia sharing front! Meaning, it doesn’t offer any sort of DLNA functionality out of the box, but at the same time, it misses out on having any physical connection in the form of a microHDMI port. Sadly, these are some common items that are increasingly becoming typical amongst its rivals – so it’s rather depressing to see the BlackBerry Torch 9850 still missing out on all the fun.

In addition to the 2.5GB of internal storage, the handset ships with a preloaded 4GB microSD card – thus, dishing out 6.5GB of total memory. Obviously, some people will be content with it, but if you require more, you can always replace the card with others that are up to 32GB in size. Indeed a relief, we like that we don’t need to pull the battery in order to access its microSD card slot.

Internet and Connectivity:

Again, we’re ecstatic to finally quash all of those terrible memories of web browsing on a touchscreen enabled BlackBerry because the Torch 9850 redeems itself on more than one occasion. First, pages load in a timely manner over a 3G connection, but we’re impressed to find that we’re able to start navigating almost instantaneously while it’s loading. Secondly, the tight and responsive navigational controls goes on to highlight how the processor and RIM’s proprietary Liquid Graphics technology are able to provide one of the most sensual web browsing experiences we’ve seen on a smartphone. And unlike some other browsers that display that checkerboard pattern when scrolling very quickly, the Torch 9850 doesn’t fall victim to it as much. All in all, we’re in love with its web browsing experience – even if there’s no Flash support!


Giving us the best of both worlds, the BlackBerry Torch 9850 is a global smartphone that will work domestically with Sprint’s network – while connecting to various GSM networks overseas. However, its support with UMTS 3G is limited to the European 2100MHz band, which means that you’ll experience  only EDGE connections if you use on the GSM networks in the States. Still, you can opt to connect to hotspot for faster speeds thanks to its 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi. Furthermore, other connectivity features with the Torch 9850 include Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR and aGPS.

Software:

Without a doubt, business and enterprise users will be entertained by the notable features on the Torch 9850, but we find the availability of Documents To Go to be especially useful seeing that it offers the ability to create and edit Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. On the other end of the spectrum, other users will adore its continued open embracement of social networking with apps like Facebook and Twitter available – plus, the Social Feeds app adds support to other things like RSS feeds. Interestingly, Sprint doesn’t add any of their usual bloatware except for the usable Self Service app that provides relevant data regarding the handset – like data consumption and available minutes. Actually, besides finding the usual set of BlackBerry branded applications, there isn’t much in the way of other third party ones except for the Amazon MP3 Store, YouTube, and Slacker Radio.

Performance:

Due to a problem with our unit, we used an AT&T SIM card for our test phone calls. There’s a faint hissy noise that’s heard in the background through the earpiece, but it doesn’t get in the way of us comprehending our callers. However, voices on both ends of the line sound shrill in tone – with sharper tones exhibited on our caller’s end. Switching over to the speakerphone, its volume is adequate, but voices sound muffled at the highest setting. Despite that, we’re still able to hold conversations without any detrimental problems.

Although signal strength appears to be consistent when it’s placed to connect solely to a CDMA or GSM network, we do notice some fluctuation when it’s on global mode. Meaning, it’s best to keep it on one particular connection to get the best signal strength.

Paying close attention to its brethren, the Torch 9850 finds itself in a peculiar position because it doesn’t boast the exceptional battery life we commonly expect to find with most handsets out of RIM’s stable. With normal usage, which primarily consists of emailing and web surfing, we find its battery life at 35% capacity by the end of the day. Naturally, it’s nothing special seeing that it’s able to get us by with a solid day of usage, but this is undoubtedly something that will require nightly charges.

Conclusion:

This is the device that RIM should’ve put out three years ago when they embarked on the touchscreen form factor with the original Storm 9530. As we know, the key to success in the industry is partly related to timing, and it’s remarkable to witness that RIM is finally coming around to producing a decent all touch BlackBerry. Needless to say, we’re glad to see that they decided to completely drop all the gimmicks found with both Storm iterations. Of course, it’s better to be late than never because its $149.99 on-contract pricing alleviates some of the uncertainty of picking it up. If you’ve been burned by any of RIM previous all touch offerings, you’ll be enamored by the intuitive experience found with the Torch 9850. Even that, however, doesn't make it quite on par with rival Android models and the iPhone, which still have much more polished software platforms to offer.

However, if you're simply after a BlackBerry device and having a touchscreen is not among your top priorities, then we'd suggest that you get the Bold 9930, which is arguably the best smartphone from RIM's camp right now.

Software version of the reviewed unit:
BlackBerry OS version:  v7.0.0.261

RIM BlackBerry Torch 9850 Review: