Blackberry Torch

For years now, Apple has entirely cornered the market on touchscreen  smartphone sales; they launched their flagship smartphone (the iPhone version 1) to great public acceptance, and have never looked back.

It now seems that smartphone manufacturer RIM want to help to end Apple's dominance (which is looking increasingly threatened, thanks to a plethora of mid-range smartphone releases within the past year) by introducing their first ever touchscreen, slide-out smartphone.

The eagerly anticipated Blackberry Torch features a 480x360 3.2-inch touchscreen, which has been hailed a vast improvement on RIM's previous effort which came in the form of the poorly received Blackberry Storm.

One strong criticism that has already been made about the Blackberry Torch is the lack of RIM's 'Surepress' technology, which made a clicking sound whenever the touchscreen was successfully pressed in order to provide vital user feedback. Despite this, the Blackberry Torch has managed to retain other much-loved touchscreen features, such as its capacitive touchscreen.

Although RIM are clearly trying to encroach on the territory of Apple's iPhone with the release of their Blackberry Torch, the handset itself has been compared more with other mid-range manufacturers such as HTC; this is no way a bad thing, as HTC are occupying an increasingly large area of the Android smartphone market, which has managed to steal more and more of Apple's stranglehold on the market within recent months.

Many critics have described the virtual keyboard that is available on the Blackberry Torch as somewhat fiddly and too narrow; fortunately, the device comes with a slide-out keyboard that helps those who utilise a keyboard a lot a great deal.

Although RIM's latest offering is not going to run Apple out of business by any stretch of the imagination, they have shown that they are more than capable of producing a fantastic and functional touchscreen smartphone - Blackberry fans will be more than pleased with the Blackberry Torch mobile phone.