Update: We've now published our full BlackBerry Bold 9900 review - so check it out.

It's been a long time coming, BlackBerry's touchscreen Bold handset. While the BlackBerry Torch offered both a touchscreen and QWERTY keyboard, it wasn't perfect for keyboard aficionados; that annoying edging, the cramped keyboard… although the touchscreen was nice to have, typing was a bit of a pain.

But with the launch of the BlackBerry Bold Touch, its first proper touch and type hybrid, has RIM finally cracked it?

RIM has made a bit of a song and dance about the new handset's looks; it's a fair shout. With aluminium highlights it has a nice, solid feel about it, and the woven glass back panel is very sharp and lightweight too.

We've grabbed some footage of the new BlackBerry Bold Touch 9900 which you can watch below for the full sneak peek effect:

It's so nice to pick up a BlackBerry and it not be a bit brickish. The Bold Touch is RIM's slimmest handset to date, and if you're a regular BlackBerry user you'll really notice the difference.

It's rocking a number of buttons around the edge of the handset, including media controls and the camera shutter button. On the front panel, the touch buttons around the trackpad include back, menu, call and end.

The back plate is very stylish, and comes off to reveal the small, lightweight battery - which is removable, despite rumours that RIM may opt for a permanent battery.

While we love the look and feel of that back plate, we can't help but worry it may be a bit fragile; we'd be wary of taking it off and replacing it too many times lest it become loose and eventually get lost.

The screen is just 2.8-inches, which is just a cat's whisker larger than the Bold 9780's 2.4-inch non-touchscreen affair.

When we first got our hands on a BlackBerry Bold 9700, we found we automatically went to hit icons on the screen as though it were a touchscreen phone, so it feels really natural to switch between input with the keypad and touch buttons and the touchscreen.

The only thing is, 2.8-inches is really a bit too small to function as a touchscreen all the time; we didn't encounter any major problems like tapping the wrong icons, but we did have to make more effort to aim our fingers than we do on the Torch with its larger display.

Plus we occasionally encountered issues swiping between screens where the handset was a little slow to respond, so we'd end up swiping again and skipping the screen we actually wanted.

But touchscreen woes could be seen as a minor gripe, given than you still have a trackpad and a full on QWERTY to play with.

When it comes to actually displaying things, the screen is lovely; the super-sauce GPU and sharp screen resolution really come into their own.