And The Winner is... The Blackberry 9800 Torch!

Last December I started shopping for a new cell phone. Although I had done my homework and was familiar with all the technical specifications my final decision wasn’t made until April after I finally had the time to play around with several examples at the local AT&T store. To be perfectly honest—there wasn’t one that I didn’t like. Considering the major “smartphones” available it would seriously be difficult to make a “bad” choice. I immediately liked the “feel” of the Blackberry and I really liked the fact that it had a slide-out keyboard. I was upgrading from an old Motorola Q9 and whenever I had used my friend’s smartphones or my wife’s iPod, I found the touch screen keyboard to be awkward and tended to make mistakes when texting but liked it for running applications. So this model seemed to offer the best of both worlds.

Unlike other Blackberry’s the 9800 did not have a “trackball” but instead a touch pad. The main reason I had avoided getting a Blackberry until now was because of the trackball. The new OS 6, the Social Networking Feed application, the 5 megapixel camera with GPS, and built in Wi-Fi support were all plusses. One reason I had gotten the Q9 was to be able to run Windows and applications such as Excel and Word. However, you will find it is almost impossible to do any real work with these applications on such a small screen. The “Sheet to Go” and “Word to Go” are more than adequate for reviewing documents and are included on the Blackberry at no extra cost. But the clincher was that the phone would cost me nothing extra as I was actually overdue for an upgrade—so it was truly a no brainer. One month later, I like it more than ever and ironically am using the touchscreen almost exclusively for texting. My wife also liked the 9800 so much that she got one of her own!

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