My Reuters app has been reporting every 5 minutes on that UAE / Saudi BB ban.
it onyl affects 700,000 BB users other than travellers.
Still, yet more issues facing BB
Torch comes out Friday!!
Tomorrow, actually.
BGR didn’t exactly love it.
Some highlights:
Hardware
Solid. That’s the first word that comes to mind. The second? Heavy and bulky. I love using this line more than RIM executives have played it out: RIM plans three years out. Unfortunately, they must still be planning for 2007, because the device is pretty thick compared to modern and current smartphones. It’s very well manufactured and doesn’t appear to be cheap, yet… it feels pretty cheap. The casing is a glossy budget-conscious plastic, and the four BlackBerry buttons are glorified piano black plastic.We’ve been using the device for over 5 days, yet we didn’t need more than a couple minutes to determine that the lock and mute keys on top of the device are extremely gentle. Since RIM AT&T doesn’t ship their flagship product with a holster (first time ever, I believe), we can’t tell you how many times the device got unlocked by mistake in our pockets.
Display
Sad. It literally makes me sad — and I’m not phased that easily. It really hits you how bad the screen is when you compare it to a BlackBerry 9700 because of how much larger the 9800 screen is. Text is pixelated, normally crisp images look low quality by comparison, and web browsing is unusable without zooming in constantly. It takes away from the experience, and if there is something RIM doesn’t understand, it’s presentation.We also have to say we noticed some wonkiness with the touchscreen side of the display at times. Mostly erroneous touch events when on a phone call (touching the top part of the display set off the lower touch buttons), though we’re not sure if this is a software or hardware issue.
Speakerphone unfortunately isn’t as successful as traditional phone calling on the BlackBerry Torch. It’s volume output was low to acceptable, but callers had trouble hearing us properly most of the time.
Unfortunately for BlackBerry 6, and the BlackBerry Torch, we experienced lag, slowdowns, and the dreaded black BlackBerry clock on multiple occasions, even when we weren’t pushing the phone hard. Simple tasks like marking more than one message as read, or exiting the web browser, or updating the social feeds application, for example set off that clock of death. Once we had to even pull the battery out due to the phone becoming unresponsive from a simple non-taxing task.
Since the BlackBerry Torch isn’t packing a bleeding-edge CPU, and since the core OS is pretty outdated, we experienced many slowdowns in panning and zooming, and even standard web page loading. We actually crashed the browser a couple times loading up our favorite non-mobile-optimized sites. This isn’t even with any sort of Flash 10.1 support whatsoever. We’re not sure how RIM will be able to pull that off at all. Unfortunately, as we said before, RIM doesn’t seem to understand presentation, and the web browsing experience on the BlackBerry Torch is neither completely fluid nor competitive to other leading mobile smartphones for the most part.
In a world where things are supposed to get simpler and easier to use, the BlackBerry Torch 9800 unfortunately complicates things. Is it the “best BlackBerry yet”? It’s certainly possible. Though it’s most definitely not the easiest to use, and even RIM’s best product at this point in time seems so far off from being competitive in the smartphone market landscape. …We’re not sure we’d recommend the 9800 to any new cell phone buyer unless they had a specific need for a BlackBerry. Even then, there’s a good chance we’d recommend the Bold 9700 (or Bold 9700 refresh device) with OS 6 on it.
Yeouch. They only things they liked were the physical keyboard, camera, and battery life.
looks alot like a palm pre
Engadget didn’t seem to like it either
They’re digging themselves quite the hole I imagine.
I like this new idea of touch screen and keyboard, I had a tour for a year than a jail broken iPhone since and i still hate typing on this thing. I’m going to grab one of these things when they come out
I’m probably going to pick one of these up as soon as they come out. I got to play with a torch a couple weeks ago and now my bold 9000 seems ancient.
BB are for work
Andriod is for people who like to stick it to the man
iPhone for people who like to impress other people with their “fancy” technology that does nothing useful (ie fanboys)
PS
To use BBM or “Pinning” you need to be on the BB network… regardless of what protocols they use, if you are not on there network. Which you are not unless you have a BB. You cannot PIN.
I played with a torch yesterday… I was actually pretty impressed with it.
I also played with an iphone 4 yesterday… and that was cool too.
BBM is what keeps me with blackberry. Blackberry groups and file sharing is amazing.
got angry birds yet?
if so, make sure it has a full charge when you come up next…
OT about Angry Birds - I found this funny;
Android has angry birds beta.
First set of levels. I got 3 stars on all of them 
I got 3 stars on all but 3 levels…getting pissed on those last 3
Which levels? I think 7,13, and the last one were the most annoying
8,13,15(last)
I remember 7 being a BITCH, but yeah, you’re on point lol
What you guys need is the Mighty Eagle… although I’m not sure you can get it on non-Nokia phones
HERE IT IS! Angry Birds on Black Berry:
ding ding ding
WIN