Here’s a short synopsis of some of the early opinions floating around after this morning’s press conference:

SEE ALSO: RIM’s Fire Still Burning With BlackBerry Torch, Or Is It?

SlashGear: “There’s a sense that the BlackBerry Torch 9800 would have been a sure-fire hit if it had been released twelve months ago. The hardware, while solid and likely reliable, pales in comparison to the current fashion for sizeable touchscreens running at high resolution, and the spec sheet in general fails to push ahead in any particular area. Given the state of the smartphone market, while the Torch is certainly sufficient to keep existing BlackBerry users within the RIM family, we’re not convinced it’s enough to cause Android and iPhone users to defect. [More here.]

Crackberry.com: “The display shines bright and looks amazing at 480x360, but a higher resolution display would have really tricked this guy out. The camera gets an upgrade to 5MP which is a very welcome addition, and includes face detection, flash, multiple modes and much more….Video recording sadly isn’t much improved (still no HD).” [More here.]

BGR: “On one hand, OS 6 is a much better UI leap from OS 5 than OS 5 was to OS 4, but it still feels a bit not thought out. On the other hand, the device seems like it will continue to excel at specific functions, mainly email, any sort of text-based messaging, etc….this is a stop gap device for current BlackBerry users… and that’s an issue. iPhone 4 or recent Android owners won’t be lusting after the 9800, and that’s never a good thing.” [More here.]

MobileCrunch: “RIM is showing its age. Its OS 6 just got all of the social media features that most Android phones already have and it just got Universal Search….To paraphrase Ferris, “The phone industry moves pretty fast. If you don’t release updates very regularly, you might miss it.” [More here.]