On August 3rd, 2011 Research In Motion® (RIM®) announced the arrival of three new BlackBerry® Torch™ smartphones. A few months ago, we explained the impact of the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 and BlackBerry® Bold™ 9930 smartphones to developers; today we’re doing the same for the next three smartphones that will be running BlackBerry® 7 OS: the BlackBerry® Torch™ 9810 smartphone and the all-touch BlackBerry® Torch™ 9850 and 9860 smartphones.

Common features to the newly announced smartphones running BlackBerry 7 OS are:

• 32-bit color (24 bits of color and 8 bits of transparency)
• 1.2 GHz Processor
• Magnetometer / Digital Compass, enabling augmented reality and advanced mapping solutions
• Dedicated 3D OpenGL ES 1.1/2.0 and dedicated 2D OpenVG 1.1 graphics hardware (41 million triangles/sec, 245 million 3D pixels/sec)
• 5 MP camera with support for 720p HD video recording
• JIT (Just-In-Time) JavaScript® compiler, yielding faster page download time than BlackBerry® 6
• Support for additional HTML5 elements, such as HTML5 Video

Key features for developers (BlackBerry Torch 9810 smartphone):

• VGA (640 x 480) screen resolution
• 8 GB of onboard memory, with microSD support for up to 32GB
• User agent: Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9810; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.0 Mobile Safari/534.11+

Key features for developers (BlackBerry Torch 9850 and 9860 smartphones):

• WVGA (800 x 480) screen resolution
• 4 GB of onboard memory, with microSD support for up to 32GB
• User agent (9850): Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9850; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.0 Mobile Safari/534.11+
• User agent (9860): Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9860; en-US)AppleWebKit/534.11+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.0 Mobile Safari/534.11+

Whether you’re a BlackBerry® Java® developer or a BlackBerry® WebWorks™ developer, the tools are available, the simulators are available, and the BlackBerry App World™ vendor portal is accepting submissions for all BlackBerry 7 OS smartphones. If you haven’t submitted your apps yet, now is the time!

If you have any questions about developing for BlackBerry 7 OS smartphones, let us know in the comments!