Opinion: BlackBerry Torch 9800 won't be able to compete with iPhone and Android as a gaming device

What’s been the best selling smartphone platform in the US over the past three years? Apple's iPhone, right?

Nope. It’s the humble BlackBerry. Indeed, to quote a figure our own Jon Jordan pulled out of his hat (it’s a fur-lined deerstalker) recently, BlackBerrys outsold iPhones 11.2 million to 8.4 million globally last quarter.

Those of us who work with and look at mobile phones from an entertainment perspective frequently forget about RIM and their all-conquering BB.

You might not be able to play Chaos Rings on one, but for millions of business users there’s still only one choice when it comes to a phone that handles communication (y’know, what mobile phones were designed for) exceptionally well.

It’s why the BlackBerry has essentially become the 21st century’s filofax – a tool that your average city type would never let out of his sight.

But RIM wants more. It doesn’t want to be pinned to a limited (if lucrative) demographic. It wants a slice of the everyman pie, the feller who buys dozens of apps about beer and farting. The person who plays games on his phone. Not that these hypothetical customers are necessarily one and the same, of course.

The BlackBerry Torch 9800 is RIM’s latest attempt to get a foothold in that market. In fact, it’s more than that. The ill-fated Storm was a bid to grab the casual dollar – the 9800 is an attempt to appeal to more of that new userbase while retaining its strong business-centric foundation.

What are its chances of taking on the likes of the iPhone 4 and the Droid X at their own game - and winning? We’ll have more idea once we’ve had a chance to play with the device (It’s not out until August 12th in the US, and no European date has been set at the time of writing), but here are a few of my initial impressions based on what we know of the device.

Looking at the all-important design of the phone, you'd have to say it’s not going to be giving the iPhone 4 any sleepless nights. It looks just like, well, a BlackBerry. That is, solid, functional, and highly unlikely to make you drool on your keyboard.

I understand that RIM has a reputation for this kind of ‘industrial’ design, and a sizeable userbase that might not take kindly to having its beloved tool tinkered with too much. But if the Canadian giant truly wants to ‘move forward’, ‘action change’, and other terms familiar to your average BlackBerry user, it surely needs to take a fresh approach.

In this area of the market looks are – while not everything – worth a heck of a lot. Just look at the iPhone 4. It loses reception if you hold it in your left hand, but I’m still willing to sell a kidney to get one (just as soon as Apple rounds up enough white paint). It’s gorgeous, and to modern tech-minded people the style of a device is inseparable from the substance.

It’s not even like RIM has to break completely new ground here. For all its failings, the Storm was a fairly attractive device, which at the very least showed that RIM was capable of making something sleek and attractive.

Still, the presence of that high-quality physical QWERTY keyboard – while adding bulk to the device - continues to set the BlackBerry apart from its rivals.

Only a few Android devices feature such a thing, and most are poorly laid out or difficult to type on. As someone who would take even the worst physical QWERTY keyboard over the best virtual effort, I see that as a major plus against the 9800’s rivals.

Onto what’s below the slidey hood, and it doesn’t look too promising for the 9800 - on paper at least. When modern high-end smartphone processors are hanging around the 1GHz region, it’s disheartening (not to mention baffling) to see that RIM's new device is stuck with the same (or very similar) 624MHz Marvell CPU that was found in its previous effort, the 9700.

Of course, the proof is in the real-world-performance pudding (I’m told it tastes like rhubarb), but early reports from Internetland suggest that the 9800 is hardly a flyer when it comes to general and multimedia performance. How would it handle some of the console-like 3D experiences that are emerging on iPhone and (to a lesser extent) Android?

One thing’s for sure – even if such games could be made to run, they wouldn’t look amazingly sharp by modern standards. The 9800 sports a mystifyingly low res 480x360 screen. To put that in perspective, Motorola’s nine-month-old, soon to be replaced Milestone (aka Droid) sports an 854x480 example. That’s almost double the resolution.

And that’s not even considering the iPhone 4’s 960x640 display.

That’s a pretty negative outlook so far, but it’s undeniable that the 9800 looks to be poorly - or at best adequately - equipped as a general multimedia phone.

One shining beacon of hope is the new BlackBerry 6 OS. It looks set to streamline a UI that millions are already accustomed to, and propel the 9800 into iPhone and Android realms of usability and flexibility.

The main area that defines the split between high-end smartphones and low-end, custom made efforts (naming no names) is the ease of navigation around their menus. When you buy an iPhone or an Android device, you’re buying into an expertly designed OS with a crisp, accessible UI as much as a powerful bundle of chips and strengthened glass.

The one major sticking point of the BlackBerry user experience in the past – the web browser – looks to have been addressed with BlackBerry 6 and the 9800. In fact, it’s been completely ripped up and rebuilt, courtesy of WebKit.

According to the BlackBerry blog, RIM has realised that “Unlike the desktop experience in which browsing sessions are usually less frequent but fairly long in duration, mobile browsing sessions are frequent, short, and focused.”

As such, they’ve copied Google’s trick of offering a single URL and search entry box – something we’re mystified hasn’t been adopted by more browsers (mobile and desktop). Web access is a vital part of modern smartphones, so if RIM can sort out this area then it will help the 9800 gain that little bit more traction with the general user.

My initial impression of the new BlackBerry, then, tells me that it isn’t going to be the huge leap into Apple and Google territory that many had predicted. It’s just too BlackBerryish for that.

But perhaps that’s all it needs to be. Business users will continue to gravitate towards the device for its strong, secure communication abilities and dependable, no nonsense hardware. If it can cause a sizeable percentage of them to abandon their secondary or 'personal' phones in the process thanks to its improved browser and multimedia performance, surely that would be enough for RIM.

After all, we should never forget that in many of the ways that matter it’s Apple and Google that are playing catch-up here.