At the joint AT&T event 03.08.10 BlackBerry made it clear to Apple and Google that it is very much in  the smart phone game with the annoucnement of its newest flagship phone, the BlackBerry Torch, and the unveiling of its new OS 6 for Bold 9700, 9650, and Pearl 3G devices.

The Torch will be a hybrid touch/qwerty device with high end camera, decent on board memory. Most importantly it comes with a boosted OS to compete with your androids and iOS.

OS6 comes with universal search (email, social feeds, device and web), social aggergation (rss, twitter, facebook, g talk updates), podcast support and wifi media sycn support.  Also nifty is the support for HTML5 with the new browser which will mean easier devleopment for multi-platform pages.

All very cool stuff, is it a real challenger to Apple and Google or simply too late to really compete?