John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

RIM Announces BlackBerry Torch, “The Best BlackBerry Ever”

Research in Motion’s long, lumbering game of catch-up in the smartphone race is over–according to RIM, anyway. At an event in New York City this morning, the company uncrated its BlackBerry 6 operating system (see video embed below)–a major overhaul of the dusty BlackBerry OS–and the BlackBerry Torch, the first device to run it and, according to AT&T Mobillity CEO Ralph de la Vega, “The best BlackBerry ever.”

RIM’s (RIMM) first QWERTY slider, the BlackBerry Torch looks a bit like the Palm Pre and features a 5 megapixel camera, 8GB of internal memory (4GB flash and 4GB MicroSD) and a 3.2-inch touchscreen display with a resolution of…480×360! (No, I’m not kidding; apparently RIM’s answer to Apple’s Retina Display is the Cataract Display.)

BlackBerry 6 gives it a decent Webkit browser (finally) and some other features we’ve come to expect from modern smartphones: universal search, social networking integration, and the like. Also on-board, a Wi-Fi Music Sync feature that allows users to access their entire iTunes or Windows Media Player music libraries from the device. BlackBerry App World comes pre-installed and supports carrier billing through AT&T.

Price: $199 with a two-year contract with AT&T (T), the device’s exclusive carrier in the States. It hits stores on August 12.

Oh, the tagline for the Torch’s new ad campaign? “Less an evolutionary leap, more like a triple Axel.

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December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

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December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

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December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

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December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik