After the slew of capacitive-touch phones over the last year, it’s only natural that every manufacturer, (who hadn’t already), would want to hop aboard this wagon. Blackberry has been one of the late adopters. After all, catering to the business segment has less to do with fads and more to do with usability, right? A QWERTY keypad is a must for corporate users and touch-screen phones seldom feature those. We’re not talking about those pesky on-screen keypads, we’re talking about the good old hardware ones, in all their bevelled, intuitive glory. Enter the Blackberry Torch 9800, Torch for short. A hybrid – featuring both a QWERTY concealed beneath a vertical slider, and a reasonably sized capacitive touch-screen.

Look and feel

At first glance, the Torch is a handsome device. Decked in a combination of matte black plastic and burnished chrome trim, the Torch is all sleek curves and gentle slopes. The front is a single slab of glass, surrounded by a rather wide bezel. Minimising the “Blackberry” moniker on the top could have yielded a slightly larger display. The Torch is heavy, on account of a vertical slider form factor, but despite its weight, it never feels reassuringly solid. This is, in part due to its size, and the slider that has the odd creak. The battery cover is thin plastic. The slider mechanism is solid, (albeit with minimal play), and the keypad underneath the slider is identical in design to the one on the Bold 9700 meaning key spacing is pretty good, and the sharp bevelling is a good cue that aids usability. The ringer mute and screen lock buttons are located on the top of the phone, on either corner, and are part of the bezel – slick design aesthetics.

Shockingly, (and this bears mention in a paragraph of its own), the covering on the buttons on the front bezel opened out while in use, exposing the actual contacts beneath. While this could have been a result of tampering before the phone reached us, and perhaps the part was already loose, but it’s unacceptable – especially for a flagship device. Below is a look at the damage.

The display is a capacitive touchscreen and at 3.2-inches is the lower limit of what we consider usable. Our thumbs feel less clunky around 3.7-inch displays, but that would make the Torch even more bulky. Blackberry should have used a higher resolution display, and while for videos and such, the 360x480 pixel display suffices, for fine text the Bold 9700 is much crisper, owing to a higher pixel density.

Click next to read about the interface, and performance of the Torch