RIM BlackBerry Torch 9860 review

RIM takes another stab at a touchscreen-only smartphone, but has the Torch 9860 caught up with the competition or has it already fallen behind the pack? Julian Prokaza finds out in our review.

IT Pro Verdict

The lack of a physical keyboard may limit the appeal of the Torch 9860 to some existing BlackBerry users, but RIM has done a reasonably good job at copying what the iPhone has to offer, even if it is now effectively a generation behind Apple with both its hardware and software.

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RIM BlackBerry Torch 9860

The screen itself measures 3.7in from corner to corner, with an 800 x 480 pixel resolution, so physically it's a fraction larger than the iPhone's, but not quite as densely packed with pixels as the iPhone 4. The display is still crisp, bright and vibrant though (it has the same 24-bit colour depth as the Bold 9900), and even the default 8pt font used for the application legends on the Home screen is perfectly legible.

Anyone who's already familiar with a recent version of BlackBerry OS should have little trouble adapting to OS 7 on the Torch 9860's touchscreen, since it works in essentially the same way when used with the optical trackpad and hardware buttons. The larger screen does make interacting with the operating system much easier than on the Bold 9900 though, and web pages in particular benefit from the increased size not least since they can now be viewed in large landscape mode, too. The new-and-improved BB OS7 web browser is also nippy, giving a time of 3203ms in the SunSpider JavaScript test, which is a shade faster than the Samsung Galaxy S II's browser but also a bit slower than the iPhone 4S.

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