Verizon BlackBerry Torch 9850 to Take on Motorola Droid Bionic 4G LTE Today

In fact, BlackBerry Torch 9850 features the largest display on a BlackBerry smartphone to date. Most of the smartphone tech world’s focus was on Motorola Droid Bionic while BlackBerry Torch 9850 has slowly sneaked in unnoticed. BlackBerry Torch will be a delight to RIM consumers in the U.S. who widely refer to BlackBerry as “CrackBerry”, which alludes to its excessive use by its owners and is a reference to the addictiveness of crack cocaine. RIM’s BlackBerry Torch is considered to be the company’s favorite smartphone along with BlackBerry Bold line. BlackBerry phones are widely popular for their slider QWERTY keyboard.

Motorola Droid Bionic, on the other hand, is an all-powerful smartphone known for its mainstay, speed. The Motorola phone features beefy specifications to compete with top-end smartphones like Samsung Galaxy S2 and iPhone 5 expected to be launched soon.

Both BlackBerry Torch 9850 and Motorola Droid Bionic 4G LTE can meet different needs of consumers. The BlackBerry phone is expected to attract business end users while Droid Bionic plans to pull in geeks and common people alike to it.

According to comScore August 30 2011 survey, “82.2 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in July 2011, up 10 percent from the preceding three month period. Google Android ranked as the top smartphone platform with 41.8 percent market share, up 5.4 percentage points. Apple strengthened its #2 position with 27.0 percent of the smartphone market, up 1.0 percentage points from the prior reporting period. RIM ranked third with 21.7 percent share, followed by Microsoft (5.7 percent) and Symbian (1.9 percent).”

Although RIM’s shares went down few months back, with the launch of seven new smartphones RIM is expected to climb back up in days to come. The new models include BlackBerry Bold 9900/9930, BlackBerry Torch 9810 and BlackBerry Torch 9850/9860. Even Motorola has not seen any major boost after the launch of Motorola Atrix in January 2011. Motorola only introduced a few major smartphones like Motorola Droid X2, Motorola Droid 3 and Motorola Photon 4G. But with the launch of Droid Bionic Motorola expects to gain back the market share from top-end smartphones.

The BlackBerry Torch 9850 is the CDMA version of RIM’s second generation Torch smartphone. As of now Torch 9850 will be available online from Verizon Wireless starting with September 8 and will be available in stores from September 15. The phone retails at for $199.99 when purchased with new two-year contracts. However, the BlackBerry Torch 9850 going to Sprint is available for $149.99 with contract. And the phone without contract is priced at $599.99.

Last month RIM introduced a new version of its instant messaging system that will let consumers use the software within their own applications as the BlackBerry-maker looks to revive slowing sales growth. Alistair Mitchell, Vice President for BBM (BlackBerry Messenger), said there are about 45 million users, with 2 million more added each month. “This is opening up the crown jewels in terms of BBM and allowing developers to be able to leverage that growth, he said.

Motorola Motorola Droid Bionic will come at $299.99 with a two-year contract. And the phone comes with ZumoCast app which offers remote access to your videos, music, pictures and documents stored on your PC or Mac. The smartphone also comes with Video Surf, Shazam-like app for videos, Motoprint for wireless printing, NFL Mobile and support for Netflix. The laptop dock is priced at $299.99, $99.99 for the HD station and $29.99 for the Webtop adapter. Accessories like car mount and battery dock are priced at $39.99 and $49.99 respectively. If you purchase both the Bionic and the lapdock at the same time, then you will get $100 mail-in rebate. Also Bionic monthly plan is offered at $70 a month for 450 minutes of talk time and 2 GB of data while mobile hotspot functionality can be turned on for $30 for a month with additional 2 GB of data. And on September 13, Costco will offer the phone for $279.99 with a free accessories bonus pack.

Here is a comparison between Motorola Droid Bionic verses BlackBerry Torch 9850.

Size: BlackBerry Torch 9850 has a dimension of 120 x 62 x 11.5 mm and weighs 135 g. Droid Bionic features 127.5 x 66.9 x 11 mm dimension and weighs 158.8 g.

Display: BlackBerry Torch 9850 has 3.7-inch 480 x 800 pixels ~252 ppi pixel density TFT capacitive touchscreen while Droid Bionic comes with 4.3-inch 540 x 960 pixels ~256 ppi pixel density TFT capacitive touchscreen.

Input features: The input features found in RIM’s phone are optical trackpad, multi-touch input method, proximity sensor for auto turn-off and accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate. Motorola’s phone comes with multi-touch input method, accelerometer sensor for UI auto-rotate, proximity sensor for auto turn-off and touch-sensitive controls.

Memory: There is a 768 MB RAM and 4 GB storage in Torch 9850 while Bionic comes with 16 GB storage, 1 GB RAM and 2 GB ROM.

3G: RIM’s smartphone has EV-DO Rev A 3.1 Mbps support whereas Droid phone has Rev. A up to 3.1 Mbps and LTE support.

WLAN/Bluetooth/USB: The BlackBerry phone comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth version 2.1 with A2DP and EDR along with microUSB version 2.0. And Droid Bionic comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth version 2.1 with A2DP and EDR along with microUSB version 2.0.

Camera: There is a 5-megapixel 2592?1944 pixels camera found in BlackBerry Torch smartphone with additional features like autofocus, Geo-tagging, continuous auto-focus, image stabilization and face detection. And the phone can capture video at 720p. Motorola Droid Bionic has 8-megapxiel 3264x2448 pixels camera with autofocus, dual-LED flash, geo-tagging, face detection and image stabilization support. The phone can capture crisp video at 1080p.

Operating System: BlackBerry Torch 9850 features the latest BlackBerry 7 operating system compared to Droid Bionic’s Android OS version 2.3.4 (Gingerbread).

Processor: There is a 1.2GHz single-core Qualcomm MSM8655 Snapdragon processor in BlackBerry phone while dual-core 1GHz TI OMAP 4 chipset processor is found in Motorola.

Battery: When it comes to battery BlackBerry Torch has Li-Ion 1230 mAh battery giving up to 6 h 50 minutes of talk time and standby up to 320 h. However Droid Bionic features Li-Ion 1735 mAh battery giving up to 10 h 40 min of talk time and standby up to 195h.

Other features: The few other features found in BlackBerry Torch 9850 SMS, MMS, Email, Push Email, IM, BBM 6, HTML browser, A-GPS support, Java MIDP 2.1, NFC support, digital compass, social feeds, BlackBerry maps, document viewer, MP3/WMA/eAAC+/FlAC/OGG player, DivX/XviD/MP4/WMV/H.263/H.264, organizer and voice memo-dial feature.

Droid Bionic has SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, IM, Push Email, HTML browser, A-GPS support, Java MIDP emulator, SNS integration, Digital compass, HDMI port, active noise cancellation with dedicated mic, MP3/WAV/WMA/AAC+ player, MP4/WMV/H.263/H.264 player, Google Search, Maps, Gmail,, YouTube, Google Talk, document viewer, photo viewer and editor, organizer, Adobe Flash 10.1, voice memo-dial-commands and predictive text input (Swype).