BlackBerry Torch 9810: Solid, Responsive, and Slightly Underwhelming

At a Glance

Expert's Valuation

Our Finding of fact

The Blackberry bush Torch 9810 improves on where the original Torch left slay, but in specs it remains far tail the competition.

BlackBerry Torch 9810 touchscreen and keyboard smartphone

Last year RIM introduced the BlackBerry Torch 9800, a touchscreen/QWERTY-keyboard hybrid. Almost on the button a twelvemonth later, the Blackberry bush Woolly mullein 9810 ($50 with a two-year contract from AT&T as of August 16, 2011) has arrived.

Designwise, the 2 smartphones are pretty similar. The serious change is in the software: The 9810 (along with the BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930 and the all-touch Torch 9850/9860) ships with the newborn BlackBerry 7 OS. Yet, although BlackBerry 7 OS is a big step up from the previous version, it silence lacks a modern, cutting-butt feeling. On high of that, I detected a few performance issues with the Flannel mullein 9810's browser.

Vertical Slider Contrive

Suchlike the Flannel mullein 9800, the Torch 9810 gives you the best of both worlds: a natural keyboard and a full rival video display. Patc the 9810 is most identical in design to the 9800, it is slimly thinner, measuring 4.3 by 2.4 past 0.54 inches (as conflicting to the 4.4-by-2.4-by-0.6-inch Torch 9800); it weighs 5.6 ounces, the same every bit the original Torch. The 9810 has a silver and black colour scheme, which gives it a playfulness, flashier look in comparison with the largely black and chrome 9800. I Doctor of Osteopathy prefer the textured rubber battery cover on the 9800 to the 9810's hard pass over, which makes the 9810 find plasticky and not as well constructed as its predecessor.

The slider mechanism feels sturdy and solid, and slides up swimmingly to give away the full QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard is beautiful much indistinguishable to the original Torch's, equally far as I can see. Information technology's slightly wider, simply you can barely tell from using it or look it. Yet, IT is a bit on the narrow side, then users with larger fingers might happen it uncomfortable. Keys are sculptured and nicely sized, and include a fistful of useful shortcut buttons. The Torch 9810 also has a software keyboard that you can consumption in portrait and landscape fashion, but both variations feel pretty cramped.

The 9810's 3.2-inch 640-aside-480-pixel display is an improvement over the original Torch's screen (3.2 inches, 360 by 480 pixels), but it still seems lackluster adjacent to Samsung's Super AMOLED Plus displays or the qHD displays we've been seeing on the stylish Motorola and HTC phones. It is also quite decreased by now's standards for touch screen smartphones. If a larger screen is what you crave, the all-touch (zero keyboard) Torch 9860 will fit the bill. The Common mullein 9810's display is battery-powered by a technology (on all of the a la mode BlackBerrys) that RIM calls Liquid Art, which is supposed to give you a "smoother, more fluid feeling experience." While I emphatically detected an image-caliber improvement in moving from the 9800 to the 9810, I didn't precisely determine the touch go through to be "graceful." I'm not predestinate if this was due to the processing power in the Torch 9810 or the software, but swipe-and-zoom in the browser stuttered, and scrolling wasn't as smooth atomic number 3 on early smartphones. On the bright sidelong, I noticed less pixelation in images in a side-past-side comparison with the new Verbascum thapsu, and text looked card sharper and easier to read as well.

BlackBerry 7 OS

Equally I mentioned previously, the Torch 9810 runs the brand-new BlackBerry 7 Operating system, which adds some much-needed enhancements to the Blackberry bush operating system. Overall, withal, I wasn't dyspnoeal away by interlingual rendition 7, peculiarly when I considered its aesthetics and performance. Several of the highlights of BlackBerry 7 Bone let in HTML 5 and support for tabs in the web browser, a built-in increased-reality browser, and spruced-risen messaging features. For a more in-depth look, check out my BlackBerry 7 OS active impressions.

Mediocre Camera

Frankly, I've never been fond of BlackBerry cameras–and unluckily, the Blowlamp 9810's 5-megapixel snapper is no exception. This is a feature I really want RIM would address in its hardware enhancements, as more and more mass use their phones to snap pictures. My indoor photos had a slight chromatic tint and looked a bit blurry, while my outdoor photos fared slightly better with brighter, more natural colors and sharper detail.

On the plus side, the Torch has a physical television camera shutter clit, a have that every smartphone should have. I can't accent enough how much I prefer a physical shutter release to a touch button connected the video display; photos turn out so much better. Connected the Tactual sensation 9810 you also get autofocus, a 4X soar up, and an LED flash. The phone has some project newfound shooting features, as well, such as scene modes and fount detection, and it presents everything within a water-washed, easy-to-expend interface.

I'm happy to see that the latest Torch boasts HD video capture at 720p, something that RIM overlooked in the 9800. Video quality looked okey, though it had the same yellowish tint I detected on my still photos. IT handled motion without pixelation (an issue I've noticed with other smartphone camcorders), but moving objects did get a number blurry. The unity annoying thing is that the BlackBerry camera software hides the video option in a menu, unequal the iPhone or Android camera interfaces (which reserve you to switch between TV and stock-still mode aside tapping an image connected the covert). You have to press the Card key and then ringlet almost all the way down to get to the video camera. RIM's determination to inter an chief feature like this is wholly baffling.

Performance

The Torch 9810 has a 1.2GHz processor with 768MB RAM, plus 8GB of on-card storage; it's expansible busy 32GB with a MicroSD card. Apps launched apace, and the touchscreen was generally responsive. The main trouble in my tests was the web browser's performance. According to RIM, Web pages have a 40 percent quicker loading time than in the BlackBerry 6 browser. This race boost is definitely apparent–media-heavy pages loaded quickly over both Wi-Fi and AT&T's mesh. The web browser's manipulation of pinch-to-zoom and scrolling was the issue: Sometimes pages went from petite to extremely enlarged in one pinch–blowup wasn't gradual. Pages also took some time to grow unpixelated after I in straitened circumstances. It was quite frustrating.

The Torch 9810 supports AT&T's HSPA+ mesh, the carrier's current version of a "4G" mesh (not its LTE network). I got pretty dandy reception everywhere I went in San Francisco. Vociferation quality over the AT&T network in City of London was good overall. Voices on the other close of the line of business sounded loud and clear; a few callers measured a morsel distant, but I could still get word them. My contacts could hear approximately background noise while I was standing on a busy urban center street corner, but they aforesaid information technology wasn't distracting.

Though we didn't formally test electric battery life, the Flannel mullein's battery life in my enjoyment was impressive. It lasted through a whole day's worth of examination, and hush had about 30 percentage left. BlackBerrys have more often than not hold good barrage life, and the Torch 9810 seems to be carrying on the tradition.

Bottom Line

Overall, the BlackBerry Verbascum thapsu 9810 is a trifle underwhelming. It isn't a huge step up from the original Torch, but HD video capture, the sharper display, and the updates in BlackBerry 7 Osmium are welcome upgrades. AT&adenosine monophosphate;T doesn't have many an Android phones with QWERTY keyboards (with the exception of the HTC Status), so the Torch 9810 might be a good alternative–particularly at the superlow price. But when you pit the Blowlamp 9810 against other AT&adenylic acid;T offerings so much as the Motorola Atrix and the iPhone 4, it seems stale and uninteresting. If you're an implicit BlackBerry fanatic, you'll be pleased with the Torch 9810, but possibly even more enticed by the BlackBerry Overreaching 9900 (likewise on AT&adenosine monophosphate;T), which has NFC support and a better keyboard.