BlackBerry Torch 9800 Review: Keeping RIM's Flame Alive
by Brian Klug on September 1, 2010 7:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Torch
- BlackBerry
- Mobile
Battery Life
BlackBerry has long held a pretty established reputation for battery life. I was obviously excited to put the Torch through the usual suite of battery life tests we run on all smartphones and see how it stood up to the competition.
For browsing battery life, we load a suite of pages on a continual loop on a special page that emulates normal browsing on the browser and prevent the display from going to sleep. Brightness is set to 50% on the device. For cellular data, WiFi and GPS are disabled. For WiFi, the cellular radio is left on and GPS is off.
For calls, we establish a call, play music on both ends, and wait for the device to shut itself off. The results weren't what I was expecting:
The Torch does a surprisingly good job on WiFi, coming close to besting the iPhone 4. That's pretty much where it stops being spectacular. Call times aren't quite as good as I had hoped, though they're admittedly above the 5.8 hours of advertised UMTS (3G) call time, so we do in fact exceed what RIM advertises. They don't publish a 3G web browsing battery life estimate, but again the Torch is middling, right with the iPhone 3GS.
I'm a bit surprised the Torch didn't fare better considering its slower than average CPU. That said, if the Marvell SoC is still 65nm, we're going to really see 45nm parts pull ahead of BlackBerry that simply do more for less power.
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brianmc - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
When are you going to review this line of phones?StealthX32 - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
Agreed. Especially since your sister site Dailytech keeps touting them as the "fastest Android smartphone".Anand Lal Shimpi - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
I'm actually working on that right now :) I've had the Epic 4G for a little while now and I'm just in the middle of writing up the review :)Take care,
Anand
synaesthetic - Friday, September 3, 2010 - link
Really interested in hearing your thoughts, Anand. I've been staring very hard at the Samsung Vibrant as my old myTouch 3G is just too slow!I haven't flashed it to Cyanogenmod 6 yet (will probably do that today or tomorrow) so I'm not sure what speed boosts I'll get there, but the Vibrant/Galaxy S's AMOLED is just stunning!
linccsdfd - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
is my love
this is a very good !
FATCamaro - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
Yeah, I've been waiting patiently for something to push iphone4 off the top of all the charts. Maybe the Galaxy S will do it. Then it only needs a better display, camera, and apps to catch up.bplewis24 - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
Since when has the iPhone4 been at the top?FATCamaro - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
Not at everything, but a lot of important factors like below.http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/blackberrytorch...
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/blackberrytorch...
Performance isn't too bad either. e.g.
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/droidx_07191023...
sammsiam - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
The Droid X comes with 8GB built in memory for OS & Apps and an additional 16GB microSDHC card. It supports upto 32GB cards for a total of 40GB possible.see this site:
www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and-Services/Mobile-Phones/ci.Motorola-DROID-X-US-EN.alt
Brian Klug - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
I had it down in my own table right, it just didn't get copied over somehow. Same for the EVO 4G. Fixed!-Brian