Reviews

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.

by: Julian Prokaza

27 Oct 2011

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Since there's no physical keyboard, the screen is also a critical factor when it comes to typing. The capacitive touch-sensor is just sensitive enough to make using the on-screen keyboard straightforward enough to use and autocorrect helps with typing accuracy. RIM has opted for a slightly different layout to its physical keyboards though, and while Backspace still sits below P, two Shift keys now sit at either end of the bottom row of letters. Return has been relegated to the far right of the Space bar too, while the Symbols key now sits to the left. The changes aren't drastic, but they seem pointless and are a little disorientating to anyone more used to a physical Blackberry keyboard. One more annoying feature is that the Shift keys barely change appearance when pressed they just gain a thin blue outline. Since the key legends stay in upper case all the time, this makes it all too easy to accidentally press Shift and not realise until something is typed.

The rest of the Torch 9860's hardware is essentially the same as the Bold 9900's it has the same 1.2GHz processor and 768MB RAM, but on-board storage has been halved to 4GB. The 5-megapixel camera with LED flash is the same too, but the addition of continuous autofocus makes for better-quality photos.