Hands-on with the BlackBerry Torch 9800

The Torch 9800 features both a Qwerty keypad and a touchscreen.

The handset does away with the clickable touchscreen — an idiosyncratic RIM technology — that the company used in its Storm handsets. At the phone's London launch, a spokesman for the company said RIM is not dropping clickable touchscreens altogether. However, as can be seen in the next picture, a standard capacitive touchscreen was needed to fit the design of the Torch.

This shot shows the relative dimensions of the body and slider screen of the BlackBerry Torch 9800, along with the USB connector on the side.

The 3.2-inch screen has a resolution of 360 by 480 pixels. The handset is 112mm long when closed and 147mm long when open. It has a width of 61mm and a depth of 14mm. It weighs 161g.

The Torch uses a 624Mhz processor and has a 1,300mAh battery. Connectivity options include GPS, tri-band HSDPA, quad-band EDGE and 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi. The Torch supports tethering, so it can be used as an external modem.

This picture shows the Torch, closed this time, from the other side.

The placement of the 3.5mm headphone jack remains the same as in earlier BlackBerry models. One person at the launch complained that the jack would be more useful on the top of the phone, so as to make it easer to listen to music when the handset is in a pocket. However, a RIM spokeswoman pointed out that a large part of the target market for the Torch is female and that the existing placement works well for phones kept in handbags.

This shows what the back of the slider screen looks like on the BlackBerry Torch. It also shows the 5-megapixel camera, another first for RIM.

One of the biggest potential draws of the Torch is its use of the new BlackBerry 6 operating system.

Designed for use both on touchscreen phones and track pad-only phones, BlackBerry 6 closely resembles its immediate predecessor, BlackBerry OS 5. The big changes lie in the operating system's integration of various web, social-networking and messaging feeds. Other adjustments have been made, such as the inclusion of cover art in the redesigned media player.

This shot shows the BlackBerry 6 notifications screen in action on the Torch. Text messages, appointments, Facebook notifications and RSS feeds are all viewable in the same place.

BlackBerry 6 integrates feeds from different social networks — in this case, Facebook and Twitter — into a unified client.

Another key feature of BlackBerry 6 is universal search, which moves RIM's user interface away from its legacy, folder-driven nature.

Available on the home screen, this unified feature lets users search once through email, messages, contacts, music and video on the phone. The function can be extended to take in the internet and App World, too.

A longstanding complaint about BlackBerry smartphones has been the relatively poor browsing experience, compared with rival platforms such as the iPhone and Android.

BlackBerry 6 addresses that to some extent, by including a browser based on WebKit, the same rendering engine that underpins Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome. The browser, which includes tabs, offers two methods of zooming: double-tapping zooms in while wrapping text in a column to enhance readability, while pinch-to-zoom brings BlackBerry smartphones in line with the multitouch capabilities of their modern rivals.

According to a RIM spokesman at the launch event, the new browser scores 100/100 on the Acid3 test. It also provides an "exceptionally high score on the HTML 5 experience", he added.

Another enhancement in BlackBerry 6 is its range of shot settings, which have arrived just in time to take advantage of the Torch's new 5-megapixel camera.