RIM Announces BlackBerry Torch 9800 and OS 6
At 11am EST, Ralph De La Vega (President and CEO of AT&T) and Mike Lazaridis (President of RIM) took to the stage in NY to give the presentation all Blackberry fans have been waiting for. At the event, they announced the “greatest Blackberry ever” going by the name of the Blackberry Torch 9800 and then following the event, Blackberry announced OS 6, which will debut on the new Torch on August 12th, with the Bold 9700, Bold 9650 and the Pearl 3G also to receive OS 6 later on.
Firstly, the Blackberry Torch 9800 is the first touch screen, portrait QWERTY keyboard phone from Blackberry. (Like the Palm Pre) It has a 3.2″ 480 x 360 capacitive touch screen, 802.11n Wi-Fi, 4GB of onboard storage with a 4GB microSD card in the Box, 512MB of ROM and 512MB of RAM, a quadband GSM 3G radio, an optical trackpad, a new feature called Media Sync that’ll let you sync your media library right over WiFi, a 5 megapixel camera and of course it runs OS 6. In America it will cost $199.99 with a 2-year contract with AT&T.
Right, on to OS 6. OS 6 is the long awaited 6th installment to the Blackberry OS. The main features of the new software apart from the name change from “Blackberry OS” to just Blackberry”, are a universal search, better social networking intergration, and the very long overdue WebKit browser with support for HTML5. As I said above, it will be available on the Blackberry Torch at launch with the Bold 9700, Bold 9650 and the Pearl 3G also to receive OS 6 later on.