RIM lights its Torch ready for BBOS 6

At the same time as RIM announced the new version of its OS this week, they unveiled the Torch 9800 from AT&T. On the programme, a physical alphanumeric keypad AND a touch screen.

Inspired directly by the excellent Bold 9700, the Torch has been designed along the same lines but with a slide version of the physical keyboard. The trackpad and the main command buttons have been moved onto the upper level and unfortunately look as if they are now touch buttons.
You'll only want to slide out the touch screen on this phone and use the physical keyboard when you're going to be typing longer messages and email. The move towards touch screens also seems to justify certain changes in the new BBOS 6 interface, such as only having 4 instead of 6 icons displayed. Good news: the problematic clickable screen that was brought in for the Storm, doesn't seem to have been retained for the Torch.

We still haven't seen enough in terms of the rest of the spec. We'll have to test the Torch out before we can make any comment on its rapidity: for the moment we only know its RAM and ROM capacities - 512 MB each. You now get a 5 megapixel camera sensor, which edges this phone rather tentatively in the same direction as other current smartphones. In terms of connectivity however, nothing to complain about as it has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi n and 3G+ compatibility has been confirmed. Another piece of good news is that while the phone has a microSF port and comes with a 4 GB microSD card, it also has 4 GB of internal flash memory.

Compared to the Bold, theoretical battery life has dropped to under 6h conversation and 3 weeks standby time.

RIM also took the opportunity to announce which existing smartphones would be able to update to OS6. There are just two for the moment: the Bold 9700 (and 9650 for the CDMA version), and the Pearl 3G (all keyboards). No luck for the Storm or Storm 2 then. In any case we'll have to wait to see how operators react on this score.

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