Blackberry fix their Touch Screen: Liquid Graphics on new Blackberry 7

Blackberry the masters of the QWERTY keyboard have made a serious effort to improve their touchscreens with a new system that they call Liquid Graphics, promising that it will be more responsive and faster.

All three of the top smartphones they launched today on Blackberry 7 feature the new capacitive touch screens with the Torch 9860 being all touch screen – a big 3.7″ display. It was the first feature raised in the presentation of the new phones.

Buggy slow touch screens had frustrated users of the Torch – a hybrid touch/keyboard screen.

Seems like they’ve made the effort to really improve the touch experience, aware that they can’t rely forever on the button-loving QWERTY users.

The rep told us that the improvement comes from the hardware, a more sensitive layered screen on the new devices that is better at picking up touch input. The faster 1.2GHz chipset in the new phones then picks up the inputs quicker and gets the graphics to respond with minimal lag time.

A few tweaks in the user interface design help the experience too – meaning that apps pop open straight into their most obvious function.

A nice unified experience that we’d expect from Blackberry.

After a Hands-On:
We had a quick hands-on – it’s a significant improvement on the old Blackberry which required you to smear your fingers along the screen to get it to budge. The experience on the Bold was pretty seamless with no discernable lag. Still, I have to say it wasn’t as responsive the iPhone 4 I use. A tiny difference, though I did notice it.

NB: the touch screen seemed to be more effective on the Bold than the Torch, but maybe that was just us. One gripe, the response time for switching the screen from portrait to landscape mode on the Torch Touch was still very slow and laggy. Maybe that’s a gyrometer problem – but it sure could be sharper.

Anna Leach

5 comments

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  • flap that either opens up that grants you access to the touch-screen, and subsequently the speaker and microphone as well

  • flap that either opens up that grants you access to the touch-screen, and subsequently the speaker and microphone as well

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