BlackBerry Torch 9810 review

We were blown away with the battery life of the original BlackBerry Torch 9800. For a 1300mAh battery, it definitely had a lot of punch.

And there's good and bad news with the BlackBerry Torch 9810.

The bad news is that for some unknown and vaguely ridiculous reason, RIM has equipped the Torch 9810 with the same battery as the older model. That's despite the fact that it has a much more vivid screen and double the processing power.

The good news is that, bizarrely, it doesn't make that much difference.

Yes, battery life isn't exceptional. Gone are the days when BlackBerry mobile phones could boast the most staying power. But, my, we've seen a lot worse.

We took it off charge at 6.30 on Monday morning. We played with it for about 45 minutes while we walked the dog (catching up on Twitter, a bit of browsing and filming a video). We made about 55 minutes worth of calls, sent and received a good 30 emails and 17 texts/Facebook messages, and by 6pm it was still saying it had 60% remaining.

So, we watched There's Something About Mary (well, we didn't actually watch the movie – we loaded it up, let it run and watched something else on a proper TV).

By the time the movie was about 1hr 30min in, the battery was down to 10%, and by just playing around we managed to get it to 5% by bedtime at 11pm. It was dead by morning when we rose.

The moral of the story is don't use the Torch 9810 to watch movies unless you have a date with your charger. But if you're just going to use it for traditional BlackBerry bits and bobs, you'll more likely than not be fine.

Connectivity-wise, all the bits that you'd expect are there – 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS.

The omission here is NFC. Not that we'll be crying into our cornflakes, since nobody uses it yet, but considering the Bold 9900 is touting it (plus the Curve 9360) as the future and comes with a big fat "I have NFC" smug face, we thought the Torch 9810 would follow suit. Evidently not.