AT&T did indeed announce today the availability of the latest touch screen version of RIM’s Blackberry, toting the also new OS6. Its appropriately called the TORCH. Here is what it has, and now we’ll see what it can do for RIM:

• World premier BlackBerry in slider form factor with touch screen plus QWERTY keyboard and optical trackpad
• BlackBerry 6 OS with all-new browser featuring tabbed browsing for access to multiple web pages at the same time and pinch-to-zoom capability
• First BlackBerry with next-generation messaging including group messaging for up to 10 people and locations
• Social networking feed application for one view of all your favorite sites such as Facebook®, Twitter™ and MySpace®
• Integrated search from home screen
• 5 MP camera with flash, autofocus, and environment settings
• Latest Wi-Fi "N" network support (Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n) for home, office, and on the nation’s fastest Wi-Fi network with more than 20,000 AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots nationwide

The Wall Street Journal has reported Research in Motion will be holding a press conference next Tuesday to unveil its new BlackBerry. All indications are the once darling of the executive class will be trying to catch up to the field by introducing a touch screen model, capable of pinching and scrolling thru features, and will be sporting a slide out keyboard, just like the modern big boys.

BlackBerry loyalists will probably appreciate the new features, but the whole world will be watching and some will be holding their breath that this won’t be a repeat of the Storm disaster. That’s really not fair, as the Storm was a good phone, it just came to the party late and was pretty much “ho-hum” by the time it was introduced.

RIM needs a hit to regain a grip on a market it once dominated. Can they do it? Tune in next Tuesday and we’ll see what we see.

The new Pearl 3G is the smallest Blackberry smartphone yet, now with 3G as the name denotes as well as many more key features.  There will also be two different models with two different keypads.  One will be the full Qwerty that we are used to for the Pearl and the other a 14 key traditional phone keyboard.  These are features that I believe should have been on the first Pearl but hey, better late then never and on a slimmer phone it can only be better.

The Bold sports some similar upgrades but in a Bold way, as well as coming with a SD card, while with the Pearl you will have to get your own.

Both of these devices can only be strengthened by the updated OS and with Voice System 5 with Voice over Wi-Fi Calling, which allows you to share your corporate phone with your Blackberry device.

Check out the specs for the two phones below:

–  Elegant candybar design measuring 4.25″ x 1.96″ x 0.52″ (108mm x 50 mm x 13.3 mm) and weighing only 3.3 oz (93 grams)
–  624 Mhz processor with 256 MB Flash memory
–  360×400 sharp-resolution display (238 ppi)
–  Optical trackpad that makes navigation fast and smooth, plus a comfortable keyboard that enables quick and accurate typing
–  Media player for videos, pictures and music (music plays up to 30 hours), plus dedicated media keys integrated along top of the handset
–  3.2 MP camera with zoom, autofocus, flash and video recording(i)
–  Built-in GPS for location-based applications such as BlackBerry(R) Maps, as well as photo geotagging
–  Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) – first BlackBerry smartphone to support ‘n’
–  microSD/SDHD memory card slot that supports up to 32 GB cards
–  Premium phone features, including voice activated dialing, speakerphone and Bluetooth(R) (2.1) with support for hands-free headsets, stereo headsets, car kits (including systems that support the emerging Bluetooth Message Access Profile standard) and other Bluetooth accessories
–  Access to BlackBerry App World(TM), featuring a broad and growing catalog of mobile applications developed specifically for BlackBerry smartphones
–  Support for BlackBerry(R) Media Sync for easily syncing photos as well as iTunes(R) and Windows Media(R) Player music with the smartphone(ii)
–  BlackBerry(R) OS 5
–  Support for tri-band UMTS/HSDPA and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks
–  Removable, rechargeable 1150 mAhr battery that provides approximately 5.5 hours of talk time on 3G networks

Full press release at Marketwire

With just as impressive updates is the Bold….

–  Stylish design (4.4″ x 2.4″ x .56″ and 4.8 oz.) with glossy black finish and chrome highlights
–  Large (2.44″) high-resolution display (480 x 360 resolution at 245 ppi), able to display pictures, videos and web pages with impressive contrast and detail
–  3.2 MP camera with flash, variable zoom, image stabilization, autofocus and video recording
–  Advanced media player for videos, pictures and music, a 3.5 mm stereo headset jack and support for the Bluetooth(R) Stereo Audio Profile (A2DP/AVCRP)
–  BlackBerry(R) Media Sync for easily syncing photos as well as iTunes(R) and Windows Media(R) Player music with the smartphone(i)
–  Easy mobile access to Facebook(R), MySpace and Flickr(R), as well as popular instant messaging services including BlackBerry(R) Messenger
–  Support for BlackBerry App World(TM), featuring a broad and growing catalog of third-party mobile applications developed specifically for BlackBerry smartphones
–  Full HTML web browser, streaming audio and video via RTSP
–  Built-in GPS with support for geotagging, BlackBerry(R) Maps and other mapping applications
–  Premium phone features including voice activated dialing, speakerphone, and Bluetooth (2.1).
–  Support for high-speed EV-DO Rev. A networks in North America, as well as UMTS/HSPA (2100Mhz) and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks abroad
–  Removable and rechargeable 1400 mAhr battery for 5 hours of CDMA talk
time

[Marketwire]

I am a fanboy, but I am not a fanboy of a single company or device. I am a mobile tech fanboy. Exploring the ins and outs of different mobile platforms almost always gives me ideas about what I want in a perfect mobile device. One exception over the past couple of years has been the BlackBerry platform. I tried the BlackBerry Bold 9000 twice over the past year and a half. Both times I returned the BlackBerry within a week because it just would not do what I needed my primary (or secondary) device to do.

Fast forward to the present and the release of BlackBerry Bold 9700 on T-Mobile and AT&T. I was very interested in the BlackBerry Bold 9700 for a few reasons:

• The hardware is elegant. It has the professional look of the Bold 9000, but a slightly smaller form factor. It also added an optical navigation pad instead of the trackball.
• BlackBerry OS 5 looked like a decent upgrade from OS 4.5 that was on the Bold 9000.
• It was available on T-Mobile as their first 3G BlackBerry.
• I wanted to see how the BlackBerry app experience was compared to other platforms since they launched BlackBerry App World
• Finally, the recent announcements from RIM regarding BlackBerry developers have all been positive from what I have read.

So, what is a gadget geek like myself do when I am curious about a device?  I visited the local T-Mobile store and bought yet another BlackBerry. Could the Bold 9700 be the BlackBerry to finally win me over for more than a week?

I am mainly going to take a look at the hardware right now.  It is the first thing you experience, so let’s what kind of impression the Bold 9700 can make.

I have always enjoyed front-facing keyboard phones. When I was a Windows Mobile user, I always wondered why nobody could make a phone that was half as elegant as the BlackBerry Bold. The Bold 9700 comes in second as far as look and feel for this form factor. While I still believe the Nokia E71 is the best designed phone in this category, it also suffered from the wimpy QVGA screen resolution like Windows Mobile non-touch devices. The 9700 has a beautiful 480×320 resolution screen. I think this should be the standard for this category of devices. Hopefully Nokia and Windows Mobile Standard manufacturers will finally be able to match this screen quality in 2010. There is no excuse for 320×240 to live on any longer.

I love buttons. I especially love it when I can customize buttons to do what I want. Other than the QWERTY keyboard, the 9700 also has 2 buttons that are customizable out of the box. In addition to those 2 buttons, there are third party apps that add the ability to customize other buttons like the lock and mute buttons on top of the 9700. You can even assign actions to double, triple, and quadruple clicks. This makes the few customizable buttons much more efficient…as long as you can remember what you assigned to each button.

The Bold 9700 is the first Bold that came with the optical navigation pad/trackpad instead of the traditional trackball. I remember using the Samsung Epix which also had an optical trackpad, but the user experience is so much better on the BlackBerry. I was a fan of the old trackball concept, but I never gave it a good enough shot to become a fan. I can’t imagine that the trackball could match the quality of the trackpad. I think this is the future of non-touch devices. The Bold 9700 trackpad is really a joy to use.

With the exception of the Storm, RIM has always been known for putting excellent keyboards on their devices. The 9700 is no exception. It did take me a day or so to get used to the keyboard, but that was mainly caused by the fact that I have been using phones with a sliding keyboard for the past few months. I had to get used to using the “alt” key more than normal since nearly all numbers and punctuation is accessed by an alt-click or the “sym” button. One of the nice features that is also available on other keyboard phones is the ability to hold down a letter to have it capitalized. I have been enjoying this on the Nokia N97 mini and E75, so I was pleased to have it on the Bold 9700. I do wish there was a better way to access frequently used punctuation like the period and comma, but I have adjusted to the keyboard the way it is.

This is a multi-part review, so stay tuned for more. If you have any questions or you want me to take a look at something specific, leave a comment.

I will admit two things up front, I am not a Blackberry fan at all, and I am a huge fan of the work the developers at Touch Mobile have been doing with their Iris web browser. The web browser that RIM has been including in their Blackberry devices is absolutely horrible.  I actually prefer Pocket Internet Explorer over the Blackberry browser, which says a lot about just how bad the Blackberry browser is.

Luckily, RIM must have finally figured out that they fail at making a decent web browser, so they just acquired Torch Mobile, the creators of the Iris web browser.  Iris is based on Webkit, which is the same magic behind a lot of popular web browsers including the ones on the iPhone and Palm Pre.

Iris was one of the first, if not the first, Webkit web browsers that was available on Windows Mobile.  I used it in the early alpha stages because I had switched to Google Reader for all of my RSS feeds a while back.  Iris was able to duplicate the iPhone version of Google Reader fairly well, so it was my go to web browser for catching up with tech news.  Of course, it was definitely not a final product because it would frequently lock up when dealing with heavy JavaScript pages.  With each new version, Iris was getting more and more stable.  This gave me hope that if I had to go back to Windows Mobile for my main device, that I could still get a similar, though slower, web experience as the iPhone.

But, now that hope is crushed.  I do not see anything that officially says they will no longer offer their Windows Mobile version of Iris, but considering their downloads page now gives a nice “403 Forbidden” page.  So, it looks like I will be in search for another browser for Google Reader when I switch back to Windows Mobile…

Do any other Google Reader users use the iPhone version on their Windows Mobile device?  What is your favorite browser to use with Google Reader?