BlackBerry is launching its new phone BlackBerry torch 9800 on 12th of August. It is named after the maker of the new BlackBerry Webkit Browser, Torch Mobile. This is the first BlackBerry phone which will be powered by new operating system 6.

The BlackBerry Torch have 3.2 inch capacitive touch screen with HVGA resolution of 480 by 360.It has a vertical slide-out QWERTY keyboard and an optical trackpad. It got a 624 MHz processor. It also comes with 512MB RAM; 512MB flash ROM, 4GB NAND Flash and as well as a bundle 4GB microSD card. It got Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 connectivity. RIM claims a talk time of up to 6 hours and a stand by time of 13 days. Torch has 5-Mega pixel autofocus camera and VGA recording capability. The BlackBerry Torch has a media player built in plus a 3.5mm audio socket, the torch can be synchronized with iTunes and windows media library. The microSD slot in Torch can hold up to 32GB of memory card.

The new operating system 6 will bring lot of features to this phone. A full HTML Webkit browser offers tabbed browsing for accessing multiple pages at the same time and this browser also supports the popular pinch to zoom multi touch gesture. It also gives a single view of social networking sites such as facebook, twitter etc. The other useful feature includes customized home screen, improved search function plus social networking support. BlackBerry 6 will also be available as an upgrade to Bold 9700, Bold 9650 and Pearl 3G customers.

RIM has given us much improved handset and software platform with BlackBerry Torch 9800.It is just a shame that is only available on AT & T in USA. Every phone has it cons; the main one is the low resolution resistive touch screen which isn’t a patch on the iPhone 4 or HTC desire phones. Although BlackBerry keyboards are very good, we can’t help out but feeling that it would be much better to improve to mount the keyboard along the long edge of the phone like Motorola does on the Droid and Milestone.