The BlackBerry Torch will finally be making its way to Canada on September 24th. Rogers announced the availability of the phone on its network today. The phone will be available online and at Rogers stores around Canada for $199 on a three-year contract. Miranda from Rogers teamed up with Michael McDowell, BlackBerry’s Director of Marketing, to show off the new cool features that the Torch has. Check out the video after the jump.

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RIM has finally updated all their lineup to trackpads which include the Curve, Bold and finally, the Pearl. As you may have heard, the BlackBerry Pearl name has been revived and renewed with the new 9100 model which includes incredible features from both the Pearl 81xx and the Bold 9700. In this review, we’ll explain to you why it’s one of the best candy-bar phones out as well as one of the most attractive and sleek smartphones out. Don’t like the BlackBerry name? We can change that. Read on…

Pricing & Features

Parents and teens can benefit with Rogers cheap pricing when it comes to signing a contract. You’ll only pay a price of $49.99 on a 3 year contract with a data plan which can be costly depending on how much you use, or you can always buy out the phone for $424.99 which is quite expensive.

For those who have handled and understood the old BlackBerry Pearl phones, you might have remembered the candy-bar style and the SureType keyboard. Well both are still available and very popular. New to the Pearl is the trackpad which is now available for every BlackBerry model. If you’ve owned the 81xx you might have noticed the dirty and stuck trackball. Well this isn’t a problem anymore. Also new is the upgraded 3.2 megapixel camera with a bright LED flash and 3G connection. Yes, we said 3G. Finally RIM has integrated 3G to the Pearl and boy we were glad they did. You’ll also get the standards WiFI, GPS, and Bluetooth technology all integrated to the 9100.

Design

What can we say about the new design? Well it’s a love or hate thing. I personally love the two-tone black and red color effect. I find it very sexy and a Rogers original signature design. I also enjoy the dark chrome color bezel that wraps the phone. On the left of the phone, you’ll find the MicroUSB vs the old MiniUSB in the 81xx along with a left convenience key and the 3.5mm headphone jack. On the right is the dedicated volume keys and the camera key and on the top of the phone is dedicated multimedia keys which can pause/play music as well as back forward button. The pause/play button also acts as a keyboard lock button. On the rear is the 3.2 megapixel camera and a bright LED flash.

Call Quality & Signal Strength

When it comes to BlackBerry. Call Quality is beyond superb. Nothing beats the clarity of what BlackBerry has to offer and the ability to enhance the audio quality by boosting the bass or treble when making calls is a great feature. I also found the speakerphone quality to be decent. You can’t really avoid echoing sometimes but that being said, it’s still better then most smartphones out.

With 3G available on the Pearl. Signal has been boosted much higher compared to the previous 81xx pearl’s. Not only do you get great signal but you also get great speeds when surfing the net and sending files through email or BlackBerry Messenger and other social clients. 3G should be a standard now a days and RIM has made the right choice and come through with that decision. While they might have been a tad late, they always come out good.

Messaging

The Pearl 9100 keyboard is what expected from a Pearl. The people who’ve had it before and love it will still love it, but those who hate it will absolutely hate it. SureType keyboard is what RIM calls it and what they do is instead of sorting the keys T9 style, they sort them like the QWERTY way but have 2 letters per keys. If you’ve used a QWERTY keyboard before, it’s not too hard getting use to. If not, it might confuse you for a while. This SureType keyboard comes to good use in the social clients that BlackBerry provides with the phone and there are a lot more social clients available on the App World.

Camera & Battery

When I first played with the BlackBerry 9100. I assumed it was just a 2.0 megapixel camera like the Curve. Why? Because there is absolutely no labeling of how many pixels the camera is. After using the camera, you realize that RIM has tricked you and that the camera is in fact an amazing 3.2 megapixel camera with a bright LED flash, even brighter then the Bold 9700. Pictures are the exact same quality though. It has auto focus and takes brilliant and vibrant pictures. It’s whats expected from RIM.

Battery life on the BlackBerry 9100 is also quite good. While it isn’t as good as the old 8100 mainly because there is 3G now, it still performs very well and lasts longer then the BlackBerry Bold 9700, about 15 hours of surfing the web, taking pictures and doing some calling and texting.

Conclusion

With all the new phones being released this summer by Rogers it’s no surprise that this one attracts many teens, especially with the low price tag, it’s a steal for parents. While it may not be the hottest BlackBerry out, It does what it’s suppose to do. Messaging on a BlackBerry is a breeze, camera is superb, and the 3G speed helps out a lot. If you don’t got money for the Bold 9700 or Curve 9300 or just don’t like the size. You can be sure that you’ll enjoy this phone. I’d highly recommend this for those who don’t enjoy the wide BlackBerry’s or just don’t want a touchscreen smartphone.

Rogers has launched some new and improved student and family plans. What’s new with the family plans is that you are now able to add a line for $15 (voice) or $25 (voice & data) and allow that line to share all the unlimited features that’s on the family plan such has unlimited evening and weekends or unlimited nationwide calling.

For students, Rogers has launched the Unlimited Student Plan which offers unlimited features that matter the most to students and teenagers including unlimited messaging and unlimited social networking. Also, for students that purchase a UMA enabled phone. They will be allowed to make unlimited calls through their WiFi connection and not have it deducted from their monthly bucket limit.

Real question is, are there any unlimited data plans or unlimited local calling plans available yet? No. So why call it the “Unlimited” student and family plan? Hmm. Tricky tricky…

[Source via: RedBoard]

The famous and mysterious 9800 has been announced by the 4 Canadian carriers and the name of it will be called the Torch. The Torch includes a fairly large 3.2 inch touchscreen with a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard as well and will be running RIM’s newest OS6.0.

Features include:

-A 5 megapixel camera
-Built-in GPS and Wi-Fi
-A new web browser
-Enhanced multimedia features for video, music, pictures and podcasts
-The new Social Feeds app for managing multiple social networks
-4 GB built-in memory plus microSD slot for memory cards up to 32 GB
-Tri-band HSDPA (3G) and quad-band EDGE support

No information on when its going to be released. Only info is “in a couple of weeks.” I’m definitely jumping for it. Are you?

Here are official statements from each carrier:

Bell – The new BlackBerry® Torch™ 9800 smartphone with BlackBerry® 6 will be coming this fall to Bell Mobility. And because apps work best on the best network, Bell clients will enjoy using the BlackBerry 9800 Torch to access impressive mobile services from Bell like TV, radio, Remote PVR, Visual Voicemail, GPS Navigator and more. We will keep you posted with more details as we get closer to availability.

Rogers – You may have seen Research in Motion’s announcement this morning unveiling the much-anticipated BlackBerry Torch 9800.  We’re excited to tell you we will carry this stylish smartphone as part of our BlackBerry lineup in the coming

TELUS – The new BlackBerry Torch 9800 with BlackBerry 6 will be coming from TELUS this year. we’ll keep you posted with more details as we get closer to launch on our network.

Virgin Mobile – new smartphone update! the blackberry torch 9800 with blackberry 6 is coming soon. stay tuned for details… http://fb.me/DAe1WKxM

Today, Rogers has announced the Apple iPhone 4 in black. Prices start at $159 on a three year contract for the iPhone 4 16gb and $269 for the 32gb. Rogers customers will also be allowed to sign up for the limited time offer of the $30 6gb plan. To find more information about the iPhone 4 as well as being eligible for a hardware upgrade, check out the Rogers Redboard

[Source via: Redboard]

Now if you still don’t believe us. Here’s another video we took again with the BlackBerry Bold 9700 (3G), BlackBerry Pearl 9100 (3G), and BlackBerry Pearl 8100 (EDGE). Comments?

Now whether you believe RIM’s official statement or not. The BlackBerry does in fact have the signal drop issue when being held as well. As you can see below, we have shot a video of my personal BlackBerry Bold 9700 in my basement that I use daily running on the superior Rogers Wireless network in Canada. This means that we know it’s not AT&T’s fault and that I guess all phone’s do have some weak spots. So what can you say? I guess Apple was right… or were they? As you can see, the BlackBerry never hit the “no service” message and was still able to send and receive data but it did drop drastically.

Sick of Android, iPhone, Symbian, or BlackBerry hype? New to the Rogers Wireless line up is the Samsung Wave smartphone which was just announced today and will feature an impressive 1Ghz processor as well as the Bada Samsung operating system. The Wave features a fairly generous 3.3 AMOLED 480 x 800 display that allows better viewing quality outdoors as well as GPS, WiFi, and a 5.0 megapixel camera. This smartphone will run you for $99.99 on a 3 year contract or $474.99 to buy it out.

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Rogers made chatr, its new unlimited talk and text brand, official today. What is chatr, you may be asking. chatr is a brand within Rogers that will offer unlimited voice and text only without a contact within defined chatr zones. This new brand will be the first in its category to offer something like this. We don’t have anything on specific plans and pricing yet, but we will let you know as we hear it.

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Earlier, we reported that Rogers had confirmed that they would be partnering with Acer to release the Liquid E. After about 4 months of long waiting, Rogers has finally released the Acer Liquid E in black. The Liquid E is the first Rogers Android phone to have the new firmware version 2.1 also known as “Eclair”, a long thin pastry made with choux dough filled with a cream and topped with icing. We don’t know why Android names all their OS’s as desserts, but its tasty and it works well.

Pricing & Features

The Liquid E will run you for only $49.99 on a 3 year voice and data plan which is quite cheap. If you don’t feel like sticking with Rogers. You can buy the phone outright at $424.99. The phone will include a battery, charger, headset, data cable, 2gb microSD card. Specifications include:

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Design

The sexy and sleek design of this phone attracts attention when being held up, but it also attracts many finger prints. I’d have to say it’s even worse then the iPhone, but the glossy all black design is a real head-turner. The curves of the phone makes it unique, but very slippery and quite hard to hold consider how wide and thick the Liquid E actually is.

On the front of the phone is a full glass touchscreen with dedicated home, search, back, and menu touch sensitive buttons on the lower bottom. At the back is the impressive 5.0 megapixel camera lens along with the speaker holes. On the top of the phone, you’ll find  a simple 3.5mm headphone jack. On the left is the dedicated sleep button which also acts as an on/off button when held. On the right you’ll find a volume rocker and camera key. On the bottom is where the miniUSB port is hidden by a rubber flap. I was curious to why Acer chose miniUSB instead of the microUSB where most cellphone companies have started making it standard.

Software

The Acer Liquid E is running on the new “Eclair” Android 2.1 firmware. What you’ll find new to this firmware is the homepage which now has a total of 5 screens instead of the previous 3. The menu is very different and is like a cube which allows you to scroll up and down while it slides. Acer has also thrown in a bunch of widgets and random crap that we really don’t need. I mean Android is open source. You should just sell the phone as is and let us customize it… That being said, it still is an improvement over the previous firmware’s that Android has released and everything seems to be much more snappier and smoother.

What we really liked about the new 2.1 firmware was mainly the pinch to zoom feature in the browser. It’s a small little feature that should have been available from the start of Android. We also noticed that live backgrounds pulse in different ways when you touch it. Android has also allowed multiple Gmail clients which is a huge step up for business users who have multiple accounts.

Processor & Battery

So with the Android 2.1 update, we’d expect everything to be much snappier and smoother, and we’ll agree it is… over the HTC Magic and Dream. Besides that, it’s really slow and lags even when scrolling in the main menu. The reason? We’re going to take a wild guess and say it’s because of the Snapdragon processor. The Qualcomm Snapdragon is in fact suppose to be one of the best cellular processors but Acer has done one of the dumbest moves and under-clocked the processor from 1GHz to 768MHz. Over 200MHz just gone.

As for the battery, it’s quite well compared to many other Android devices. It lasts about 12 hours on normal usage and requires daily charging as any smartphone does. It uses a 1350mAh Li-ion Polymer rechargeable battery. What I found annoying was that the MicroSD was being blocked by the battery. Now I know this wasn’t a big deal before but now it’s standard that the MicroSD card should be accessible without removing the battery. Just a small flaw that I found annoying.

Call Quality & Signal Strength

Acer is quite new to the mobile phone industry, and although this is an Android smartphone that does web browsing and the whole shazam. Some people might forget that it also does voice calls, something we often forget in a smartphone. So what can we say about the call quality? It’s quite good. Calls were absolutely clear with no drop calls. On the other hand, speakerphone was horrible. Not only was I not able to hear the other person because of the insanely crap speaker that had high treble and no mid, but there was echoing and lots of background noise.

Thanks to Rogers decent wireless 3G service, we were able to get signal almost everywhere with this phone. 3G stuck on 95% of the time while having the upgraded HSPA+ 7.2mbps speeds hitting on over 70% of the time. Signal never dropped randomly and in my basement alone, I was able to get at least 3 bars which is average.

Camera

The Acer Liquid E features a 5.0 megapixel camera with auto focus and a very decent one but lacks flash. I mean Acer… common. Couldn’t you have put a simple LED flash? Picture quality decrease drastically in low lights due to the missing flash. In outdoor and bright lights, pictures are crystal clear and come out with strong vibrant colors.

There are multiple features in camera mode including ISO100 to ISO800 configuration. Not many cellphone’s have this option but what it lacked was macro mode. Something a 5 megapixel camera should have. You also have multiple color effects, white balance, anti flicker, picture size and picture quality options. All that are tunable to your liking. You’ll also now have the ability to record videos but only in VGA resolutions.

Conclusion

Although I found this phone to be quite feature packed. I just don’t think it’s really worth it. The phone in general is an under-clocked fatter version of the Sony Xperia X10. Acer has thrown in a bunch of useless applications and widgets that slowed down the phone tremendously. What I did like about the phone was the amazing LCD screen. It’s very clear and bright and probably one of the best quality LCD screen’s I’ve seen, but not the largest. In conclusion, if you can save the money and invest it in something better like the Sony Xperia X10 or even the iPhone 4 when it becomes available in Canada, you might just be more satisfied with your purchase.

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