Here is a short one week review of the Blackberry Torch 9810.
Preface: For the last year I was using a Blackberry Style on Sprint's service. The connection I was getting had been gradually getting worse and calls were so bad that I often had to have people repeat themselves several times over the course of a short call. While using the Twitter ap, it would lose service completely. Only on the Twitter ap. That was odd.
I saw an ad for another service provider (that I had before Sprint) that would pay to break an existing contact and provide a free phone. I had been looking at the Torch because of the larger screen AND a hardware keyboard. I cannot type on a virtual keyboard unless the keys are large. IPad large. I can count to two so I changed providers and phones.
+1 The Torch has a new operating system and the browser is an incredible update. It was so bad on the Style that I installed Opera Mini to have any shot at opening a website (even a mobile website). Now that's not a problem. General speed of things have improved greatly. Facebook, Weather Channel, Twitter, etc.
+1 The keyboard is better than the style. Feels like the same size, just a different feel.
-1 The size. I'm used to a smaller form factor and this thing won't fit in my pocket unless I am wearing incredibly baggy pants. It's also quite heavy. I got an Otter Box for it and makes it a lot bigger.
+/-0 The battery. Not enough time has gone by to adequately asses the battery life. Seems good so far though as I've turned off location services and I make sure I close everything instead of hitting the back arrow. The backlighting set at only 10% works perfect. I don't play games on my phones so I don't kill the battery that way. The phone is on 24/7. I still wish there was an easier way to close programs instead of hitting the BB key and scrolling to close. I know you can hit the C key but in email you have to hit it three times to get to the close command. A little tedious.
+1 The touch screen. I have an iPod Touch and an iPad (and a junk Chinese knockoff tablet). This touch screen works great for what I use it for. Scrolling works perfectly. Tapping to delete emails or to perform other actions is awesome.
+1 Call quality. So far so good.
+1 Camera. I got used to the odd location of the camera on the Style, but with the Torch it's in a logical location.
+/-0 Email. It's a Blackberry and works no different than the Style. I like it. Your mileage may vary.
I wish the call quality of the Style and Sprint in general were better because I would have stuck with them both.