Gadgetory

hey guys and gals Mike Pearlman here with a slow dramatic zoom on the blackberry torch 9850 for Sprint will this phone illuminate your path to smartphone salvation find out in our full review vo comma and Bienvenue welcome to my blackberry torch 9850 review this is a sprint phone as BlackBerry's all touchscreen phone except for this little thing right there and that's an optical trackpad for you blackberry diehards this is available through Sprint for $150 with a two-year contract and that's the online pricing after you use your $50 reward card I think in the store it's 200 with the two-year contract let's light the torch with calling this phone runs on Sprint's 3G video network I did a series of calling tests roaming and in the regular 3G territory what I found was that I never had a dropped call and that's very good at certain times some calls would exhibit a kind of crackly sound or a muffled tone but I think that was definitely dependent on the area I was in or the other person's phone it's a very loud phone I mean this thing you can crank the volume up the phone also has Wi-Fi 802 and be GNN but anything on the 3G network was actually faster than my iPhone and that is due to Sprint's 3G network so let's also talk about the speed inside what's going on inside who are the little elves turning all the gears it's a 1.2 gigahertz processor and it has 768 megabytes of RAM to me this is the fastest smoothest blackberry yet this thing is just a snappy little Snapdragon and I'm just really really impressed with it blackberries come a long way so congratulations to blackberry that's to you here's to you rim single clap single single tear okay so I didn't have any hiccups the only hiccups I had was Facebook crashed on me once and I got this strange venetian blind effect with the contacts so basically I went into my contacts and they all started to kind of give me this venetian blind mumbo-jumbo but it went away after I restarted the phone so I haven't had any problems at all we'll talk about the screen to you notice how beautiful the icons are it's a three point seven inch capacitive touchscreen with the 480 by 800 WVGA resolution congratulations to blackberry I could finally watch YouTube videos and not feel like I'm watching 8-bit NES games I think is a big improvement those this screen is not a super ammo LED it's not a Retina display so don't expect look at that sorry this review has been rudely interrupted by a mercedes-benz commercial overall I love the design it's very aesthetically pleasing its sleek its slender its sexy and I really like the metal backing on this phone you don't find that on many phones these days very nice so when I take the back panel off here I am exposing you to a 1230 milliamp hour battery this battery is slated for six hours a six hour continuous talk time what I found was it was closer to the five closer to the four hour 50 minute mark it's still very good battery life and it lasted longer than the iPhone inside for memory this phone has eight gigabytes it has a four gigabyte microSD card and it also has four gigabytes of internal storage at this price range honestly I would have expected to have seen 16 gigabytes the camera button and the volume rocker are fairly diminutive on this phone and they're hard to press they're just not fun buttons to press they don't love to be touched and we want buttons that love to be touched and now it's the moment you've all been waiting for the black very 7os shakedown we're taking it down to shake down Street okay so first of all I want to say this is a step in the right direction I'm really impressed this is the best blackberry operating system so far today okay I like the universal search option and let's just go ahead and test it out here for you TechnoBuffalo okay and look at that John our pops right up the ambassador of all things Buffalo all things techno okay so I also have a TechnoBuffalo shortcut here we're taking it to the Internet now the Internet is finally usable I'm really impressed with it pinching and zooming fantastic there's no flash however and I think that's that's an important factor no flat so we're kind of in iOS territory but I will say that Facebook and Twitter applications and aggregation is fantastic I'll just give you a little taste of Facebook here okay and here's my awesome profile okay it's just so easy you can see this phone is just the hardware and the software are optimized they play with each other very well it's like this the hardware is the peanut butter the software is the jelly and together they make a gourmet peanut butter and jelly sandwich of smartphone goodness Wow that was lame okay and there's also social feeds obviously aggregates everything together here all of our Facebook Twitter everything that you're signed into all into one that's great okay so this BlackBerry is actually highly capable as far as internet standards go as far as social networking it also has wicked cool google talk here okay let's chat up Noah right now you are lame whoops and okay we're getting a taste of the keyboard the keyboard for me was very difficult it takes a lot of getting used to but let's see what his response is going to be I can't wait for this it might take a while alright we might have to cut wait for his response and then not come back you're mean oh I heard his feel meds I got to go make that better the one thing that I wish blackberry would migrate away from is the the antiquated menu system so for instance if I go into ringtones you know and I make selections here I mean and look how anti-glue vien that is I mean that can you talk about before the flood I mean that's it right there say I change a ringtone okay let's go into evolving aspiration ooh that sounds so mellifluous alright let's let's try it mmm nice okay so now I go back save it's an extra thing that I have to I can't just tap save on the screen and that's classic blackberry though the other thing is I mean I like the application tray here the the different trays divvied up into frequent all favorites media etc the only thing is look at all this open space this unused space here I think widgets could easily camp out there if they wanted to and you know maybe that's something that we're going to get down the line with Q and X I don't know but to me it just looks like a lot of open space here when it comes to applications this phone is severely lacking and I think that's one of its main Achilles heels here we go let's go into app world and this is the new app world that's really exciting that it's new the only problem though is I mean the application there's no Pandora there are no Angry Birds there there are no mainstream big-time applications here and any of the games that I did download were they would have been great in 1995 if I was into like minesweeper so that I'm not really excited about i blackberry reason really needs to do a lot better with their application selection we do get brickbreaker right out of here and i know i'm starting this game over but i beat this game over and while it was pretty lame we have a Maps program here it's just really lacking compared Google all right now it's time for one of my favorite parts of the review it's the camera and BlackBerry's in my experience and I've compared them to hundreds of other phones on the market have one of the best cameras on the market the blackberry torch 9850 is no different okay this is a really great camera I was very impressed with its clarity with its detail and its color its low-light sensitivity was also fairly impressive so this phone definitely deserves accolades it has 720p video HD video at 30 frames a second and the bright bright light is phenomenal low light is noisy and the one thing that I didn't like about this phone was that you couldn't toggle the video light while you were shooting video and that's just that's just the main thing the other main thing is the fact that I had to go through all of these submenus again to make adjustments on the camera one last thing with the camera is that if you slip it over to landscape mode you get this bar it's kind of a translucent bar but it makes it seem as though this is your frame when in fact your frame goes edge to edge so that's something that kind of needs to go away basically what's going to happen here is I'm going to give you my pros and my cons pros fast this is one of the fastest blackberry phones to date I'm very excited with this phone it's the first BlackBerry I've used that actually was not glitchy it has a pretty screen I love the 3.7 inch screen I love the fact that it's a little bit bigger than an iPhone take that and also it has good calling very good calling reliable calling in my experiences and my testing okay great style I love the style of this phone overall excellent communication one of the best phones to email on to text message to to use blackberry messenger one of the best messaging systems in my opinion in the mobile world however here are the cons blackberry 7 Oh nice but as I stated earlier anti de lluvia and too many manual steps on you space here we could use some widgets so that is something to consider we could use more memory it has 8 gigabytes out of the box I'd like to see 16 minimum for this price camera interface needs improvement we just went over that and maybe a bigger battery for better battery life overall I think what we're seeing here is a fantastic phone a good effort for RIM a couple years ago this phone would have been very popular however I think based on the competition from Android iOS the blackberry torch 9850 is kind of behind the time slightly so this has been my blackberry torch 9850 review I hope you enjoyed it and like I said wait for Q and X to come out code name cult it's galloping across the screen right now okay so wait for it who knows what's going to happen for any other BlackBerry news tech related news be sure to go to TechnoBuffalo comm and I will see you guys on the flipside