• Pros

  Looks and feels good. Lots of new features. Integrates social-networking well.

• Cons

  Browser still slower than iPhone 4. Fewer games and apps than iOS or Android. Poor Microsoft Exchange integration for consumers.

• Bottom Line

  The BlackBerry Torch is the very model of a modern messaging smartphone, although it doesn't beat the iPhone or Android on media and games.

The new BlackBerry Torch 9800 with BlackBerry 6 keeps RIM in the smartphone game. It's the first truly usable touch screen BlackBerry, and it's packed with new features—a new Web browser, new apps, a new interface, and new social networking hooks. It might even save you money. Messaging is still clearly at this phone's core, though, unlike on flashier all-touch phones like the Apple iPhone 4 ($199.99-$699, ). That leaves the Torch a strong bet for those who type and chat all day, and still behind the leaders for those who prefer to game, surf the Web, or watch videos.

There's a more subtle advantage to the Torch, too. Our other top AT&T phones tend to have a flashy, media-focused sheen that may not appeal to corporate customers. They also lack QWERTY keyboards. The Torch gives you a touch screen and excellent media features, but with the hard keyboard and serious BlackBerry attitude that may make it more welcome at work.

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Hardware and Phone Calling
BlackBerry phones always feel like premium hardware, and the Torch is no exception. The 4.4 by 2.4 by .6 inch (HWD), 5.7 ounce Torch is black and silver, with a soft-touch back and a comforting heft. The phone is all plastic; although it's premium plastic, I might have enjoyed a little more metal. Closed, the phone fits perfectly in your hand. The screen slides up with a strong, springy motion, revealing a BlackBerry Bold-like keyboard. Just below the screen, there's a now-standard BlackBerry trackpad, which works as smoothly as ever.

Specifications

Service Provider

AT&T

Operating System

BlackBerry OS

Screen Size

3.2 inches

Screen Details

360x480, 16-million-color TFT LCD capacitive touch screen

Camera

Yes

Network

GSM, UMTS

Bands

850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100

High-Speed Data

EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA

Processor Speed

624 MHz

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There's one slightly off note. The keyboard feels unusually flat. It's still a good keyboard (and much more usable one-handed than many Android keyboards), but it doesn't have the depth, key separation and throw of the stellar BlackBerry Curve 8330 () keyboard, or even the full click of the BlackBerry Bold 9700 ($199.99, ) keyboard. RIM had to make this keyboard extra-thin to fit under the slide.

Now, about that touch screen. The Torch's 3.2-inch, 360-by-480 screen is a modern, responsive, capacitive touch screen. It's not a "click-screen" like on the BlackBerry Storm series. It's a touch screen that works just the way you expect touch screens to work. The phone is packed with wireless connections, but they aren't state-of-the-art. The Torch works on AT&T's and foreign 2G and 3G networks. The phone also has Bluetooth 2.1 and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n. You get HSPA 3.6 for Internet as opposed to HSPA 7.2; that means Internet connections are limited to about 1.5 megabits/sec down, which you'll mostly see when using the Torch as a tethered modem for your PC.

The Torch is a good voice phone with some odd audio characteristics. Reception was average. The earpiece and speakerphone are both quite loud. But there's no noise cancellation in the microphone; my voice came through clearly on the other side of a call, but so did all of the street noise around me. And I found the phone's side-tone—the little bit of your voice that comes through the earpiece to stop you from yelling—to have a very slight, just-noticeable buzz. The phone paired just fine with our Aliph Jawbone Icon ($99.95, )Bluetooth headset, including triggering voice dialing.

Continuous talk time, at 4 hours 36 minutes, wasn't great for a 3G phone. But like on other BlackBerrys, I found the Torch has a longer "average use time" than other top smartphones; I could go at least a day and a half without charging.

Web, Messaging, and Apps Experiences
The Torch is the first BlackBerry to run the new BlackBerry 6 operating system, which offers many new features including all-new desktop syncing software. For more details on BlackBerry 6, check out our BlackBerry 6 review.

I wanted to call out one unusual feature here, though, because RIM might not. RIM told me that the Torch will compress all data except video as it transfers over AT&T's airwaves. That means you may be able to get more Web pages and messages on AT&T's 200 MB $15/month data plan than you can with other phones, which don't compress the data.

The new OS offers a great balance of keyboard, trackpad, and touch screen input. You can do almost everything two or three ways, making this the best AT&T phone for people more comfortable typing on a hard keyboard than on a touch screen.

RIM's new WebKit-based Web browser is a big part of the experience, and there's good news and bad news about it. The good news: it's faster and truer to desktop Web pages. I found the new browser to be 25 percent faster at rendering pages than the browser on the BlackBerry Bold 9650 ($199.99, ), which has the same screen resolution and processor. The new browser scored more than 10 times faster on Javascript benchmarks. For the first time, RIM has a solid browser built in.

The bad news: the browser may be a huge jump over RIM's previous browser, but it's still slower than the iPhone 4. The iPhone 4 was two to three times faster, both at rendering pages and on the SunSpider Javascript benchmark.

Part of the difference is clearly processor and graphics based: the Torch uses the same 624 MHz, ARM11-class processor as in the Bold, while the iPhone 4 and top Android phones are using 800 MHz or 1 GHz, Cortex-A8-class processors that are twice as fast or faster. Sticking with the basic Bold platform helps keep the Torch compatible with third-party software, though. Apps I downloaded from BlackBerry App World generally worked, except if they tried to hand off to the browser (like Viigo (Free, ) does.) Some apps didn't use the touch interface, but they worked fine with the trackpad and keyboard. That said, BlackBerry is still behind other platforms in terms of delivering a rich array of apps. While I found games, business, and entertainment apps in App World, there are just many fewer than there are either in the Android Market or on the iTunes Store.

Messaging, of course, is the phone's strong point. The official Twitter app is attractive and versatile. Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook messages, as well as IMs appear both in your universal inbox and in a "social feeds" app, and you can send items from the browser or camera to Facebook or Twitter. Social networking contacts feed into your address book, along with a history of your communication with them. There's no easy way to merge duplicate contacts, though. And RIM's devices have problems syncing with Microsoft Exchange accounts if you don't have a corporate BlackBerry server, as I discuss in the BlackBerry 6 review.

The Torch has GPS, which locks on quickly to geotag photos and Twitter posts. It comes with the somewhat tedious AT&T Maps app, but BlackBerry Maps is available as a free download. AT&T Navigator provides turn-by-turn driving directions for $10/month.

There's some other AT&T bloatware on here. You can't delete it, but you can hide it—it includes AT&T's Yellow Pages app and that obnoxious Where location-based-advertising app. And yes, there's a new, touch-enabled version of Brick Breaker.

Multimedia and Camera Performance
For a description of BlackBerry 6's new music and video players, check out our BlackBerry 6 review. Here, we'll talk about performance on the Torch.

The Torch offers lots of media options. The device has 4GB of on-board storage and comes with an additional 4GB MicroSD card; our 16GB Kingston card also worked fine. You can sync and store your own music and videos using BlackBerry Desktop, which syncs with Windows Media Player and iTunes. You can download podcasts using the built-in client, buy music using AT&T Music, watch TV on MobiTV or PrimeTime2Go, or listen to Slacker Radio. A "Web Video Search" icon searches across several different streaming Web sites, including YouTube and ifilm.

Videos formatted using BlackBerry's desktop software or saved in QuickTime using iPhone settings looked great and played in full screen. YouTube videos, irritatingly, tended to have to buffer in the middle. Videos downloaded through PrimeTime2Go or streamed over MobiTV played smoothly over the phone's speaker, a wired headset, and a Plantronics BackBeat 903 Bluetooth headset. Face it, though: a 3.2-inch, 360-by-480 screen just doesn't give you the same cinematic experience as the larger displays on competing smartphones.

The 5-megapixel camera is a good example of the form. It's quick and responsive, though it every once in a while just forgot to focus; a software update in the middle of my testing period dramatically improved its performance, so I think the problem will be entirely fixed soon. Still images were sharp with good color, though occasionally slightly hazy. A "face detection" mode forces the autofocus to look for faces. VGA-quality videos were smooth at 24 frames per second; let's note, though, that competing phones such as the iPhone 4 can capture videos at 30 frames per second. One very neat touch: the camera added locations to filenames, such as "Queens-20100725-00043.jpg." That made filenames a little more readable than on most digital cameras.

Conclusions
The BlackBerry Torch keeps the flame alive, but it's not a barn-burner. RIM needed the advancements here just to stay in the game against the flashy Apple and Android interfaces. BlackBerry 6 merges touch-screen and keyboard interfaces smoothly in a way the BlackBerry Storm never did. RIM's data compression may even save you money; if cellular providers are poised to ratchet down the amount of data you're allowed to use, BlackBerry owners are in the best position.

If you're looking for a messaging-focused smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard, this is AT&T's top choice. Neither of our other top AT&T phones, the iPhone 4 and the Samsung Captivate ($199.99, ) have QWERTY keyboards. That's a deal breaker for many people.

The state of the art in Android and Apple phones has vaulted into super-high-res screens, 4G radios, tens of thousands of apps, and glorious 3D games. The BlackBerry Torch doesn't live in that world: it's for people who live on e-mail, IM, Facebook and Twitter, for whom typing updates and messages is their number-one priority. For them, the Torch will be a shining light.