Sunday 16 January 2011

My experience with BlackBerry Torch (9800)

As expected in my post titled Android, no more..., when my mobile phone contract was due an upgrade I didn't go with an Android device, many factors affected my choice, mainly "out of the box" Arabic support - I got myself a BlackBerry Torch (9800) ! If you want a list of its specs you can check them here.

 Below is a list of factors that made me go with BlackBerry.
  1. Arabic support out of the box. Having suffered from lack of Arabic support on my previous Android device, it became the first thing to check when choosing a new mobile phone. I was happy when testing the device in the store, I browsed to Arabic web site, and it displayed as expected, no more squares ... I could read Arabic emails, websites, tweets, etc... without having to install anything at all.
  2. Push technology. This meant I receive emails instantly for any email address I setup. On the other side, this will save battery life as email was "pushed" to the device, rather than the device "pulling" emails.
  3. Webkit browser. When it comes to mobile web browsing BlackBerry devices with OS 5 or earlier, aren't the best, but with OS 6, Webkit based browser (same browser used on many platforms, including Android) was introduced, though still lacks "Flash" support, but it's way better than previous versions, especially when used with the touch screen.
  4. Response time. As we're talking about my experience, honestly, the response time on my previous device, there was about a second or so lag between when I press a button and actually get the response; whereas on the Torch, it was so fast that it felt as if it responded before my finger touched the screen!
  5. Battery life. Again, switching from Android device, where I had to charge the device at least once everyday, this was definitely an advantage.
  6. BBM. I ran Instant Messenger on mobile phones before, but having an IM application running in the background (keep pulling the data), your battery won't last long, with BB it didn't really affect the battery at all. 
  7. Touch screen / slide-out keyboard. This is one of the things I liked most, as you can use the "on screen" keyboard (portrait and landscape), which is useful when typing in Arabic (or any other than non-Latin character language), and or the hardware keyboard, which once used to, it is so comfortable, and the typing accuracy rate is high.
The above list is only some of things I liked about BlackBerry Torch. There are many other things that I like that aren't listed above, and I'm more than happy to share my experience if you ask.