BlackBerry Torch 9860 review

Does RIM's first proper all-touch smartphone shine?

BlackBerry Torch 9860
Blackberry OS 7 comes to phones for the first time on the BlackBerry Torch 9860

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The BlackBerry Torch 9860 can record videos at 720p (1280 x 720), 640 x 480 or 176 x 144. It records in 3GP format.

BlackBerry torch 9860 review

The video is 30 frames per second, with a fairly high bitrate of 14Mbps, which combine to mean that motion is very well captured in the two outdoors clips. There's little motion blur, and almost no artefacting.

BlackBerry torch 9860

There's a decent amount of detail in these outdoors shots, but the skateboarding clip shows that there can be issues with the autofocus wandering around – having focused on the skateboarder, it then switched to one of the skaters in the foreground as they went past, before settling back on the first skater.

The low light shot is an order of magnitude poorer, however. The LED flash can't be turned on to use with the video camera, so anything slightly low light indoors will incur the huge amount of digital noise visible in the third video. It totally destroys any detail there might have been.

You can upload to YouTube straight from the video recorder if you want, or send the file over Bluetooth.

Matt Bolton
Managing Editor, Entertainment

Matt is TechRadar's Managing Editor for Entertainment, meaning he's in charge of persuading our team of writers and reviewers to watch the latest TV shows and movies on gorgeous TVs and listen to fantastic speakers and headphones. It's a tough task, as you can imagine. Matt has over a decade of experience in tech publishing, and previously ran the TV & audio coverage for our colleagues at T3.com, and before that he edited T3 magazine. During his career, he's also contributed to places as varied as Creative Bloq, PC Gamer, PetsRadar, MacLife, and Edge. TV and movie nerdism is his speciality, and he goes to the cinema three times a week. He's always happy to explain the virtues of Dolby Vision over a drink, but he might need to use props, like he's explaining the offside rule.