Research In Motion (RIM) has launched three new smartphones running their newly developed BB7 OS, an operating better designed for touchscreen devices than its predecessor. Whilst BlackBerrys are considered business phones with QWERTY keyboards for quickly typing emails and BBMs, one of the new products, the BlackBerry Torch 9810, will be a touch-only device, with the company taking a fresh look at such a form factor after the unpopular BlackBerry Storm series.
The Torch 9810 is RIM’s attempt to gain more general consumer smartphone customers, a sector currently heavily dominated by Apple’s iPhone and Android devices from the likes of Samsung and HTC, and comes with a 3.7″ screen and a camera ready to shoot 720p video. Each of the phones come pretty highly stacked on the specification front as well with 1.2GHz ARM processors, 768MB of RAM, and offer near-field communications. They may not be packing the raw processor power of the dual-core Samsung Galaxy SII, but they are certainly no slouches.
The next 6 months look to be a defining moment in smartphone development, with dual-core processors making phones as powerful as many laptops, the release of WebOS phones from HP, a consumer orientated touchscreen BlackBerry, Windows 7 smartphones from Nokia, and a rumoured iPhone 5 (or 4S). The smartphone arena may well look very different come 2012.