Asha Javeed

The fastest way to have in­for­ma­tion at your fin­ger­tips is get a smart­phone. These days, smart­phones are less a sta­tus sym­bol and more a work tool. It's been five years since TSTT launched Black­Ber­ry in­to the mar­ket. Jay Alvi, TSTT's ex­ec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent En­ter­prise Ser­vices, says the com­pa­ny had more than 60,000 Black­Ber­ry cus­tomers. The com­pa­ny has passed through sev­er­al evo­lu­tions of Black­Ber­ry phones and has now elim­i­nat­ed all Black­Ber­ries with track­ball. Alvi said the track­balls were prob­lem­at­ic for cus­tomers and the com­pa­ny took a de­ci­sion to of­fer phones with the the track­pads.

The four phones now be­ing of­fered: the 9100 Pearl, the 9300 Curve, the 9700 Bold and the newest ad­di­tion, the 9800 Torch. Alvi not­ed that the Torch's charm is the com­bi­na­tion of touch-screen and key­board in­ter­face which it of­fers. In ad­di­tion, the Torch is run on RIM's newest op­er­at­ing sys­tem OS 6- an op­por­tu­ni­ty all Bold 9800 users will have when RIM tran­fers them to that sys­tem. Alvi ex­plained that US tele­com com­pa­ny, AT&T–who had pre­vi­ous­ly sold the Ap­ple's iPhone ex­clu­sive­ly– had an in­put in­to the mak­ing of the Torch. The Torch was mar­ket­ed as RIM's ri­val to the iPhone but with Black­Ber­ry's fea­tures like Black­Ber­ry Mes­sen­ger and a five megapix­el cam­era. Un­like oth­er phones, though, the Torch can work with a RIM de­vice called the Black­Ber­ry Pre­sen­ter.

The Pre­sen­ter con­nects to the Torch phone by blue­tooth and en­ables it to de­liv­er pow­er point pre­sen­ta­tions. The tar­get mar­ket for the Torch smart­phone is TSTT's high-end clien­tele and its cus­tomers who have an ap­petite for to­day's so­cial net­work­ing. TSTT's com­peti­tor, Dig­i­cel, al­so in­tro­duced the Torch to the mar­ket this week. Dig­i­cel's com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er, Pen­ny Gomez, told the Busi­ness Guardian de­scribed the Torch as a lifestyle phone. "It tran­scends a de­mo­graph­ic-from the busi­ness ex­ec­u­tive to young en­tre­pre­neur," she said.

"These ad­vance­ments in tech­nol­o­gy cou­pled with our su­pe­ri­or Edge net­work is what, we be­lieve, will be the mar­ket dif­fer­en­tia­tor for us." To com­ple­ment the smart­phones, TSTT will launch the Re­search In Mo­tion's (RIM) Play­book tablet in Feb­ru­ary 2011. Alvi ex­plained that un­like the iPad, which runs on Wi-Fi, a Black­Ber­ry would act as a mo­dem for Play­book. By month-end, TSTT will al­so launch a My-Fy prod­uct. The My-Fy is a wire­less prod­uct, us­ing Wi-Max tech­nol­o­gy and run­ning on TSTT's 4G net­work. "Up to four de­vices can use the My-Fy which is quite dif­fer­ent from Blink-On-The-Go. So this is just an­oth­er op­tion to bring Wimax in­to the mar­ket," said Alvi.