RIM is sticking to its guns with the BlackBerry Bold 9780.

Apart from its brand new BlackBerry 6 OS, the Bold 9780 looks like the twin brother of the Bold 9700.

When I first saw the Bold 9780, I was hard-pressed to find anything new in this latest BlackBerry number.

The only differing trait is its black trimmings along the edges of the phone. The Bold 9700 shares the same fittings in chrome.

The Bold has everything going right in a qwerty form factor, including a compact body and a much acclaimed keyboard.
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The BlackBerry Torch 9800 is RIM’s first slider phone and represents an attempt to reclaim its mindshare among businesses who are increasingly lured by the use of the iPhone within the enterprise.

The Torch is a marked improvement over its predecessors, with a new BlackBerry OS 6 that offers a more intuitive user interface, a faster Web browser (through its acquisition of Torch Mobile), a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen and better integration with social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

The phone is well-built, with a screen that slides upwards to expose the Qwerty keyboard. The sliding mechanism is smooth and offers good tactile feedback, unlike the Motorola Droid which can be difficult to slide open at times.

Those who are not used to a BlackBerry keyboard could take a while to acclimatize to the keys and the layout of symbols, numbers and punctuation marks. Though the keys are small, I managed to type comfortably with good accuracy, though those with larger fingers might encounter more typo errors. For folks who prefer to use a touchscreen to type, there’s an onscreen keyboard that will be activated when you slide the screen back down. …

Trust Adobe to hold a regional briefing on Flash on the day the Apple iPhone 4 was launched. The date, of course, had added significance now that Steve Jobs and co. have decided not to support Flash at all in any of its iPhones or iPads.

Despite that, Adobe predicts that 53 per cent of the more than 300 million smartphones to ship by 2012 will sport its Flash software to show off multimedia websites on the small screen. Currently, only 9 per cent of the less than 50 million smartphones have Flash.

This is a daring prediction, given that only a small number of Android Froyo 2.2 handsets – mainly the Google Nexus One – support Flash on the go. Other Android handsets such as the Motorola Droid/Milestone and HTC Desire are being updated in the coming months. …

As official details of Google’s new smartphone OS finally came from the company’s I/O conference in San Francisco yesterday, it must have dawned on most users – including Steve Jobs and his cult of ardent iPhone lovers – that this was a key turning point in smartphone development.

While the iPhone, through good tech and not a little hype, has drummed up interest in smartphones among even non-techies in the past two years, the arrival of Android 2.2, known as Froyo, from June this year clearly pushes Google-based phones ahead of the early leader.

As Mashable describes it, it is a “slap in the face” for Apple. …

Google has done it, so why not Microsoft? Just hours ago, the software giant unveiled two self-branded phones aimed at getting the non-techy crowd on social networking services on the go.

Called Kin One and Kin Two, they look a little like a miniaturised Nokia N97 mini and a Blackberry with a slide-out keyboard. But hey, why change a proven design if rivals have made it work?

Both phones feature a Windows Phone OS that reminds one of the Zune HD interface, and will hook up to the music service seamlessly. But the OS – not Windows Phone 7 – looks like a hugely simplified affair, going by images and reports out so far. …

The Nokia E72, the followup to last year’s E71 sleeper hit, has gone on sale here for S$750 (without any subscription contract).

Featuring the same large screen + Qwerty keyboard layout in a skinny frame, this will likely be a hit with the Blackberry crowd as well as existing E71 users looking to upgrade to a new phone that’s sans touch-screen .

What we like most: 10.2Mbps 3.5G downloads – great for downloading those huge attachments or when surfing the Net for football scores, of course. Other useful features: an optical navi key, as well as a decent 5-meg camera (not bad for a “business” phone).

Of course, going with Nokia means you have to live with the Symbian OS, which is a plus to some but minus to others (mostly Android fans like me).

Still, outside of Blackberry, there were not many phones that did mobile messaging better than the original E71 last year. The E72, with some new components under the hood, should appeal to the same group of heavy messaging users.

A touchscreen with a tactile keypress. That’s probably the most strikingly unique feature about RIM’s first touchscreen device – the BlackBerry Storm … aka its 9500 series.

The concept of its “SurePress” touchscreen certainly sounds good … on the screen – a capacitive touchscreen that you can not only tap, double tap, flick and drag your finger on, but also click on.

Click on a screen? Hmm. But will it make typing faster and easier?

While the idea of a clickable touchscreen sounds great, in reality, it didn’t quite click with me. The touch and tap aspects of the screen were great – you could highlight, copy and paste, swipe your finger to scroll etc. But when it came to typing, which I’d imagine you’d do a lot of on a messaging-centric device like a BlackBerry, that’s when the idea of a clicking screen started to come apart. First, it takes some effort to click the screen – more so than needed for a light tap on the touchscreen. And closer to the edges of the screen, the clicks needed even more effort. Will it have worked better if the screen required less effort to click? I think not.

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I met up with the Nokia folks recently and got my hands on the upcoming Nokia E75 messaging phone, which we wrote about at its launch in February 2009.

Let’s start by saying this ain’t your average slim phone. In fact, placed next to my HTC Touch Diamond, it is much thicker and bulkier. But that’s not exactly the best comparison, as you’ll see soon after getting a feel of it for the first time.

If I hadn’t told you this was a phone with a slide-out keyboard, you might just be fooled. Now, if you consider that a full-sized Qwerty is hidden in that shiny frame, would you still consider this a thick, ugly phone?

Nope, I didn’t think so. It’s actually pretty small for a device with so much packed in.

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The BlackBerry Curve 8900 was launched in Hong Kong earlier this week. So it’s touted as the “thinnest and lightest full-QWERTY BlackBerry”. OK, next. What’s really whipping up a bigger … er .. storm and much more eagerly anticipated is the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm.

While it’s not yet officially launched here, parallel import versions of the Storm (some which are Vodafone labelled) are surfacing at about HK$4,000 or less. Just do a Hong Kong Yahoo Auctions search for it here. Or if you’re here, go check it out at the (in)famous cellphone/computer malls.

I’ve only managed to have a cursory touch and feel of the Storm which belongs to one of my colleagues and my initial immediate impression was that it really had some weight, and it feels kinda chunky. Specs put it at 155g – the iPhone 3G weighs in at 133g so that explains it.

Its much talked about ‘tactile’ touchscreen does indeed seem to work pretty well and the big, bright 3.25 inch screen should make it THE multimedia BlackBerry. And they thoughtfully included a ‘normal’ 3.5mm audio jack.

But since unlimited data here still ain’t cheap, I think its lack of Wi-Fi will leave it in the hands of folks who have their companies pay for their unlimited data BlackBerry lines.