The folks of Mashable have managed to score a BlackBerry Torch 9800 unit for testing purposes and published the video below showing what the new smartphone is all about. The device is a premiere, since it’s the first handset to run BB OS 6 and the first RIM device with a touchscreen and sliding QWERTY keyboard.
The video shows one of the phone’s useful features, the new unified Inbox, that comes with social networking features, too. BlackBerry Torch’s virtual keyboard looks nice and the menu scrolling is pretty OK, although a bit laggy at times. The BlackBerry App World application store is very user-friendly, but it has a long way to go before reaching the app variety of the Apple App Store or Android Market.
Torch also packs a trackpad, that you can use to get around menus, in case the touchscreen is not enough. The video above demos the video playback feature as well and the web browser for a moment. The latter is based on a new version of WebKit and overall Torch is a good smartphone, but its lag is a major downside, possibly due to the 624MHz CPU on board.
