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Miranda MacDonald: Hi, I’m Miranda MacDonald. The BlackBerry Torch 9800 is set to join Rogers lineup. We know there has been a lot of buzz about this device and that many of you want to learn more – so that’s why I’m here with BlackBerry’s Director of Marketing, Michael McDowell, to take a closer look at the Torch and some of the cool new features. Michael, let’s dive right in. Tell us some of the cool features of this device.

Michael McDowell: First and foremost, it’s all about the hardware. What we’ve done with this product is combine the touch-screen interface with the track pad as well as our best-in-class keyboard – essentially giving the user the ability to use the device any way they like.

Some of the other cool features are Social Feeds, our browser application, our enhanced BBM. The browser is really one of the most exciting ones because it is our first time that we’ve introduced the Web Kit browser. Web Kit is the smartphone standard for  browsing technology – and it introduces a faster browsing experience than on our previous operating system, as well as things like tabbed browsing, pinch-to-zoom. All of the features that are typical for a smartphone today.

Miranda MacDonald: You mentioned Social Feeds. What’s that all about?

Michael McDowell: Social Feeds is an application that is built right into the home screen. What it is is an aggregator of all your social networking apps: facebook, twitter, MySpace, BBM – and it puts all of the status updates from your community and friends right in one place. What is great about this product is I can in one click post directly to all of my social networking applications or chose which one I want to post to. ery convenient, very easy, all in one place to get your social networking.

Miranda MacDonald: I understand the Torch is the first device to launch with BlackBerry 6. What does that enable customers to do?

Michael McDowell: Sure. We packed quite a bit into BlackBerry 6 but really the one thing to point out is what we’ve done with the UI. And with the UI we’ve really changed it to be “fresh and familiar,” — familiar to our existing BlackBerry customers so they’re used to the great experience of a BlackBerry device, but fresh. So it’s something new, something exciting that new entrants into the smartphone category can really get excited about.

Miranda MacDonald: And what feature do you think Rogers customers will be most excited about?

Michael McDowell: Hopefully they’re excited about probably my favourite feature, which is Universal Search. From an onscreen keyboard or the physical keyboard directly from the home screen, I can type pretty much anything and if I type your name, what will come up is actually your contact, any emails that you were on, calendar invites with your name on it — and you can go direct to the web and search YouTube or Slacker for maybe you’ve done a viral video out there where your name’s on it. All direct from the device. And what it does is it indexes everything so its immediate – and very quickly comes up with the result.

One of the other great pieces of Universal Search, is the ability to search options of the product. So, if I type “Set Ringtones,” it actually will go through a search and pull up the Option menu and I’ll see how to set a ringtone.

Miranda MacDonald: Very cool. So that’s just a quick look at the BlackBerry Torch 9800. We’d love to hear what you think of this device, and as always, if you have ideas for other video segments you’d like to see, you can find me on Twitter. I’m @RogersMiranda.