BlackBerry Torch 2 previewed before announcement, liked

The BlackBerry Torch 2 has leaked again, this time in a big way - a pre-release unit was put through a whole preview. The preview confirms the positive impressions of people who have played with the Torch 2 even despite its unfinished status.

The BlackBerry Torch 2 is very similar on the outside to the original model with some superficial tweaks. The build is very solid (as expected of BlackBerry) and the Torch 2 has a keyboard just as good as the one on the original, same solid slider too.

BlackBerry Torch 2 (pre-release unit)

Aside from the external looks, RIM went and bumped up all the specs they could think of by 50%-100%. The Torch 2 runs BlackBerry OS 7 with silky smooth graphics and touch responsiveness (helped by the more powerful hardware), new HTML5 capable browser and magnetometer support.

The CPU runs at 1.2GHz (up from 624MHz) and the RAM amount went up to 768MB. This increased processing power allowed RIM to put a 3.2” VGA screen with excellent viewing angles on the BlackBerry Torch 2 (double the pixels of the 3.2” HVGA of the original).

The video camera records 720p video, though the still camera is still a 5MP unit. The rolling shutter effect is a problem it seems, at least for the pre-release unit tested. Other changes under the hood include 8GB internal memory (expandable by microSD cards) and NFC support (though that couldn’t be confirmed).

BlackBerry Torch 2 next to the old one • Next to an iPhone

The one major complaint in the preview about the BlackBerry Torch 2 is that it hadn’t slimmed down from the original dimensions.

Check out this quick video overview of the BlackBerry Torch 2 and after that you can read the whole preview over at Engadget.

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