RIM’s new BlackBerry Torch 9800 will be lighting up the lives of smartphone fans. Reg Hardware had a sneak preview of RIM’s flagship that features the first outing of the BlackBerry 6 OS, shown in this video. Research In Motion launched the phone exclusively on AT&T in United States. RIM hopes to revive its smart phone market. RIM holds the second position among the smart phone vendors worldwide with 18% market share.

The BlackBerry Torch 9800 is a sliderphone, so the Torch will appeal to newcomers who are more inclined to use its exciting touchscreen interface – and also to the Crackberry fans who can access its physical Qwerty keyboard, that appears when you slide the handset open.

The screen itself is more responsive and has less of the quirks of the BlackBerry Storm 2. Finger swipes scroll through several screens showing All, Favourites, Media, Downloads and Frequent. URLS can be added as shortcuts to the main screen for easy access, along with links to feeds from other applications, as social networking and collating messages from various sources is a major focus of this handset.

The main menus can be expanded or collapsed by tapping the menu bar. However, once inside an application, things become slightly counter-intuitive, as you need to revert to the handset’s back button to climb out from depths of an application’s various levels or to exit.

The BlackBerry 6 WebKit-based browser looks impressive on the new screen and seemed smooth and swift enough, with its support for tabbed browsing. Although a revised BlackBerry Maps is touted as a feature, it wasn’t on the handset provided. Given how slovenly BlackBerry’s can be to locate a GPS signal, it was a pity this couldn’t have been improved.

Speaking of improvements, the Torch 9800 features a 5Mp autofocus camera, there’s flash and geo-tagging too, but the video recording is merely VGA. The images look fine, as does viewing video from the dedicated YouTube app.

The new Torch 9800 is pretty exciting, its big screen helps with the viewing limitations of typical BlackBerry handsets and its slide out keyboard takes care of the business, where virtual keyboards fail. That said, the Qwerty keyboard backlight didn’t glow on the test model – perhaps an energy saving feature – so the virtual option may come in handy at times. Still, the Torch 9800 seems like a sensible departure for RIM and, alongside its new OS, is a handset that many will take a shine to.