While Blackberry has an unrivalled cabinet of QWERTY smartphones, it’s had a hard time shaking off its businessy rep. The Storm and Storm 2 were its first attempts at providing an alternative to the iPhone, but still felt like a CEO awkwardly wearing a party hat and schmoozing with the company freshers.

The Torch, though, is a different beast. It’s the Canadian company’s first slider phone, combines a full QWERTY keyboard with a 3.2in capacitive touchscreen and brings a fresh new Blackberry 6.0 operating system.

BlackBerry Torch 9800 - Design & Build:

Stowing a QWERTY keyboard beneath the touchscreen deck means the Torch is quite a bulky unit. Girth aside, the slide action is smooth, satisfyingly heavy and, like the rest of the device, as solid as they come. That button panel, like the rest of the design, won’t surprise anyone who’s seen a BlackBerry before.

In 2010, Research In Motion claimed that the its Blackberry Torch 9800 was the "Best Blackberry ever", but it looks like that could soon be about to change. Enter the "Blackberry Torch 2 9810", RIM's next-gen slider smartphone with bumped up specs. 

BlackBerry Torch 9810 - Design & Build:

Doubling the 624MHz CPU of the original Torch to 1.2GHz, the second-gen Torch is rumored to pack twice as much muscle under the hood. This will power its 3.2-inch 640 x 480 VGA touchscreen, which is coupled with a slide out QWERTY keypad. To make the most of its physical keys, it will also arrive equipped with Facebook and Twitter integration, a dedicated email client and Blackberry Messenger (BBM).

The BlackBerry Torch 9860, otherwise known as the 'Monaco/Monza/Touch', is annouced to be the fully-touchscreen follow-up to the BlackBerry Storm 2.

BlackBerry Torch 9860 - Design & Build:

The Torch 9860 will have the highest-resolution screen in a BlackBerry today according to the early specs, which'll measure in at 3.7-inches with a 840 x 480 WVGA resolution. This'll be coupled with RIM's traditional optical trackpad, which nests in between four raised physical keys (Call, Menu, Back, End Call). It may not sport a full QWERTY keypad, but it'll still come boasting email support, Facebook and Twitter access, and RIM's much-loved IM service, otherwise known as BlackBerry Messenger.

RIM has launched five new BlackBerry smartphones but the BlackBerry Torch 9850 is the only one that is a new design for RIM.

BlackBerry Torch 9850: Features

The Torch 9850 (launching in the US as a CDMA model known as the 9860) is a pure touchscreen device with a 3.7in (480x800-pixel) screen – the largest on a BlackBerry device to date. The 253dpi display, 5Mp camera and 720p video camera are powered by a 1.2GHz processor and 768MB of RAM. Primed with 4GB of internal memory, the Torch 9850’s memory will be expandable by up to 32GB via a microSD card. The handset has Wi-Fi and HSPA+ connectivity and runs BB7 – the brand-new version of the BlackBerry smartphone OS. It also comes with a digital compass, Bluetooth and GPRS connectivity.