It’s been a

couple years since I’ve last used a BlackBerry, so a number of things have changed since then. The Torch is supposed to be the best BlackBerry ever, but it seems there are a few issues with the software. Check out our quick video tour below to see what we’ve found included with the BlackBerry Torch.

The universal search is a great feature and should be very useful. Unfortunately there are a lot of issues with the BlackBerry 6 OS that may keep others away. There are little glitches and bugs here and there including a very reproducable method for causing the task manager to freeze. The Torch comes with a lot of bundled applications that aren’t really bundled. They’re just shortcuts to a web page where you can download the apps yourself.

There are still plenty of usability issues with the BlackBerry platform as well. On a positive note, the application icons now have labels that you can see all at the same time without having to scroll over each one individually. That should make finding the program you want much easier, and if it doesn’t, the universal search will. Unfortunately there are still plenty of unlabelled icons in certain apps, and the tool-tip that is supposed to tell you what the button does only appears occasionally. The BlackBerry menu still does not show all commands at one time so users may not know that there are more options available, and the menu items do not have keyboard mneumonics for quick activation, however typing the first letter does jump between menu commands that begin with that letter.

Unfortunately, the BlackBerry still requires a BlackBerry server in order to sync your contacts, calendar, and tasks with Exchange server. It feels weird to have a phone these days that does not directly support Exchange ActiveSync, so to me, it really feels kind of useless without BES (which I don’t have on my Exchange Server).