Initial hands on review
 

I don't think this is the type of review you want coming out of the gates:

BlackBerry Torch 9800 hands on « Boy Genius Report

That preview bashed the majority of the phone :/ .. I don't blame him with the underwhelming hardware. In regards with software I just hope the preview phones they have were just running old software or something. :(

RIM needs to do it better and harder if they want to compete. I was hoping for more.

Here's a comment I found on engadget from a user who said he has played with one.


There need to be some clarification about how to compare things here:

- Some folks are judging the phone in terms of the size of the screen. I personally dont want to use a huge 4` screen in my hand. You cannot get a conclusion that a phone is bad if the screen size is smaller than the others.
- Some folks say, cpu should be >1Ghz. Why this necessity? If the response times of apps and OS itself is good, then i can say processor power is adequate.

As an experienced (and honestly tired) BB owner I would look for some more important points:
- Reload time of the phone & response time of the applications(especially while multitasking, its been a pain for years).
- Memory usage. I dont want to restart the phone to free up some memory anymore.
- Is the new OS better looking and more modern? I am sick of seeing old OS design for almost 6 years. As far as I see, the design improvements with new OS are definitely not enough to keep the current user numbers.
- Browser. But not as important as you think. Its quite different here guys, when you use your BB for the work most of your time. However, BB should integrate much more modern one in 2010, agree.

Result: Although I am a BB fan for many years, after seeing email-integration (not talking about gmail. companies donot use gmail for business) on Android is getting better in every release; I can easily say I will not buy a new model of BB anymore. Its really not fun anymore(or should i say Android is much more fun?). I believe, if the business-email-integration on Android gets more robust and more secure, hardly noone uses bb.

This.

My workplace is moving to Googlemail. I was hoping for much more from the 9800 and have changed my mind about getting one. I will wait to see how my new work environment functions with my 9000 and wait for more information on how the 9800 works in normal use. My next phone may be an Android if I can get something close to the unlimited international data plan I get from ATT now.

another problem with Android is ATT doesn't offer a decent one...they get the iPhone and are leaders of the pack for BB, but not much in the way of Android phones.
As for me, I'm giving the Torch a go...can't wait for the 12th.

Have you seen the Captivate?

yes....a feature that I really want, is for my phone to be a WiFi hotspot and it don't do it...if so, I may skip the 9800 and go that route. (the screen and 1GHz processor is impressive).

Yes and my son has one. Love the screen but the battery life is quite poor.

also if you hold the phone it basically drops 2 bars of service, the antenna is on the back battery cover or that is where it get's its signal. So if you cover that your signal drop dramatically.

Not good for low coverage areas. You drop completely off.

True. But people want more features, better processors, bigger and brighter screens. Overall they want more out of their phone. To get that, you are going to have to sacrifice battery life.

That's what I said prior to taking delivery of my Samsung Captivate. As a long time AT&T and Verizon customer, who maintains four lines (such a geek I am) I will be the first to admit I was critical of the Captivate until my friendly AT&T mgr put one in front of me for a very low price. Even then I hesitated since my past Samsung experience was mediocre at best.*

Well, it just goes to show that things do change. Call quality of the Captivate is stellar, ver 2.1 Eclair runs great on this model. Not to mention that Samsung just announced ver 2.2 Froyo is on it's way. Q4 brings ver 3.0 which by all indications will be an LTS release (long term support). My Droid X is another fine example of the momentum behind the platform, and my iPhone 4 is already feeling dated (even with hi-res display).*

At the end of the day, it's the market that will sort out the winners & losers. *2011 will be a very interesting year in the smartphone segment.*

In looking at the reviews, the 9800 is certainly not the game changer that the Bold 9000 was two years ago. However for me who use my Bold 9000 primarily for business, I will not be jumping ship for an android or iphone. There is no better platform for e-mail and security and Blackberry efficiency of data usage is unsurpassed.
I will take a serious look at it when it comes to Canada because it has twice the application memory of my Bold 9000 and it can run OS 6 because of its greater memory. I run a lot of third party apps and have deleted some of my less used apps because of application memory limitations on the 9000. I know I can upgrade to the 9700 and get the added memory now and OS 6 in the future, but why not get the 9800 which is definitely an upgrade (if not earth shaking) from what RIM currently offers now.
One of my biggest disappointments is battery capacity. I need to charge at least daily. The battery in the 9800 with all its bells and whistles has less capacity than the battery that comes with the 9000 and 9700!!

I also experienced short battery life, out of the box. Then I spent a little time changing screen brightness, browser brightness, and other settings. After those changes, I now get great battery life. It lasts as long as my iPhone 4. I must say I've grown quite fond of the Android platform. Previously I could not have imagined using anything but a BlackBerry with it's stellar keyboard. Yet after a miserable year with a Bold 9000, and not wanting to give up on BlackBerry, I was determined to wait for the much rumored replacement. Once it was officially announced at first I couldn't believe what they had done without so much as a hint. But seeing it in person confirmed it. That was the last straw. I can only imagine how many others RIM has lost in that same time frame for a wide variety of reasons.

I think i'm dropping the ball on BB.. I never really was the ecentric business person. I just enjoyed the bb because it was simple yet had a lot of features. I'm just disappointed that the 9800 isn't the 'consumer attention getting' device. For now since I'm going to upgrade I'll prolly get an android .. then hopefully by then RIM has got some ball rolling on a better device. I shall be back! Although not yet since I'm still shopping LOL :P

If you are speaking from personal experience, I would take it back. I have two, no matter how I hold them there is no signal loss. Signal strength & call quality are stellar. The claims of decreasing signal are a myth perpetrated by Apple. Android strikes fear in the minds of Apple and it's fanboys. Therefore they go out of their way to bash any Android handset.

no actually goto android forums, many people who own the phone have this problem. Put it on the table, and check out the bars go full, pick it up lose 2 or 3 bars.

I've seen those reports & tried it on mine, but do not experience any decline in bars. Just like the example Apple used of the Blackberry signal loss, much of this is exaggerated "Antennagate" fallout. No one reported any problems in real world use prior to, during, or even after for that matter. I do know one fact, I own both phones & the Captivate has far better telephone performance than the iPhone 4 does.

Well you must have a different batch, because the problem on mine was very real, would drop connection all together if I was in 2 bar area. Have to be in low signal area for it to affect it so you can tell. Either way the early on ones had this problem.

It wasn't a death grip it was just touch the back of the phone while holding it.