RIM the Canadian company (I am Canadian) that made ‘push-mail’ a household corporate word conjured up a Storm when they came up with their own version of a touch screen. Why did they have to go about reinventing something that has worked well for decades. Well, why not and somebody at RIM probably told people because they can.

So, here I am with a BlackBerry Storm and funny enough being a Canadian I had never touched a BlackBerry before this. I always alienated myself away from the BlackBerries because they were just so corporate. They also didn’t look like a stylish device to be toting around. If you plan to read on let me make clear this is not a comprehensive review. The reason for this is the device itself has been around a while and like most things probably reviewed by many a review site. My intention is to give a end user perspective of the Storm. So on with the show.

I picked up the evaluation unit from Lewis Public Relations Pte Ltd and got a brief introduction by the PR folks. The Storm was pretty much what I had imagined even from a distance – big, bulky, unfashionable and meaty. It kind of spoke of the bigger sizes of the average North American. One thing for sure if you had this in a shirt pocket and happened to get struck by a stray bullet in that exact spot it would surely stop the bullet and save your life.

Let’s take a look at the package.

 

Top Edge	Storm Left Edge
Storm Right Edge	Storm Button Face

 

BlackBerry Storm Specifications 

The layout of the device is straightforward and what you may not first become aware of is the top edge has two buttons – mute and screen lock. They are marked with icons but do not resemble traditional buttons. On the left edge is a single button that activates the voice command and just below that is the micro-usb port for charging and data transfer. Looking at the right edge you will find the camera shutter release button and the volume up/down toggle. The 3.5mm audio jack is located on the right edge and some may not like this because it would make a right angle in your pocket that just screams accident about to happen. Broken 3.5mm jacks from an expensive set of headphones/in-ear plugs would be quite maddening.

Oh yeah, the Storm comes with a nice leather holder (not a holster) that will automatically lock the screen and buttons when inserted. There appears to be an RFID tag of some sort inside the holder that is sensed by the Storm. It isn’t magnetic, because I ran a couple fridge magnets over the unit without any effect. I wonder if the holder is specific to the phone.

  

 

The rear of the Storm has a 3.2-megapixel camera with LED flash. The cover is metallic and this contributes to the device being heavy but it probably also makes it more durable and rugged. 

 

 

The camera is what you’d expect from a 3.2-megapixel camera phone device. It did exhibit some strangeness with the detection of ever so subtle patterns. You can see in the picture above the vertical bars in the picture. This was the after effect of the camera reacting to the ‘grain’ in the backdrop cloth. It did not exhibit this problem with normal picture taking. My other camera phone cameras does not exhibit this problem. I did find low-light picture taking to be hit and miss, especially close-up pics. The result was always overly exposed by the super-bright LED flash.

 

 

The Storm has a built in accelerometer to determine the orientation. So, when you switch from portrait to landscape it is smart enough to rotate and format on screen the open application. See above for portrait orientation of icons and below for horizontal orientation.

 

 

The same is true for when you are inputting text but the added smart is when it switches from portrait keypad mode to landscape virtual qwerty keyboard mode.

 

 

By the way, RIM was the company to introduce the condensed keyboard design and functionality called, SureType. It works quite well and in some instances even better than the Tegic T9 dictionary keypad input.

 

 

I really appreciated the small tweaks incorporated with the text input. I liked the auto-capitalisation if you hovered on the letter a little longer.

 

 

There was also the appearance of accented foreign characters. Very useful and appreciated for foreign language users. Similarly this appeared when you pressed and held a key that could be accented, mostly vowels if you are into European languages and arguably something RIM had to do for international acceptance and for the fact that Canada’s second official language is French – Parlez vous francais?

There was one thing I didn’t appreciate and that was the way RIM decided to arrange the numbers like a numeric keypad when in landscape virtual keyboard mode. Instead of situating the numbers across the top like a normal keyboard RIM decided to place the numbers on the left-hand side in the number-pad layout. It presented a confusing interpretation for a qwerty touch typist. Perhaps if it were a number pad on the righthand side of the screen like a regular keyboard, I would have felt more at home. Still, since it is in full qwerty mode I would have expected it to mimic the real keyboard and have it across the top row.

An interesting and cool enhancement if it were like a real keyboard with running numbers on top would be to enable it to also output standard punctuations like the real keyboard layout. In similar operation to capitalisation, press and hold the key and instead of an upper case character appearing, the punctuation. Example: Numeric 1 = ! , Numeric 2 = @, Numeric 3 = #, and so, you get the idea. This would reduce the need to scroll for the symbols.

 

 

 A SmartPhone is really only as smart as the applications available and those applications need to address either the needs of the business or that of the consumer. Since the Storm is targeted at consumer needs I wasn’t disappointed with the selection of apps. The great thing is the applications are built by RIM so the integration to all the bits is tight.

These days if you don’t have FaceBook, Flickr, MySpace of Google Maps you are not hip and with it. Well, the Storm is with it and then some. Included with the social network applications you get the ability to view Microsoft Word documents and a slew of instant messenging apps. MSN Messenger, AOL, ICQ, Google Talk, Yahoo and although not included by default easily found, a Twitter client.

I really liked the FaceBook implementation because I didn’t actually have to load the built-in browser and then launch into FaceBook. The Twitter client was also uber cool because it took into consideration the built-in GPS for location lock-on. It would enable other twitters to know exactly where you twitted from.

 

 

 

UberTwitter is a very nice application and I would love to see more smartphone applications mimic what can be found on the Storm.

 

 

Summary

My time with the BlackBerry Storm was great so much so that I think I need to testdrive a BlackBerry with a real keyboard. I’ve been hunting around for my ultimate pocketable Internet type of device but have not yet found what I need. In the running, would be a BlackBerry device (only thing is the screen size and camera quality), HTC TouchPro2, Nokia N97 and Samsung Omnia Pro B7610.

Good

• comes loaded with the majority of social networking connectivity (applications)
• battery life is pretty decent and it should be for a smartphone
• clickable touchscreen (this really worked well most of the time because the visual feedback before actually depressing the screen for a click (selection)) Personally, I believe users that have never experienced or used a touchscreen before would gravitate to the Storm’s clickable touchscreen interface. (it can however become tiring after a while of clicking because the pressure required is enough to give your wrist a workout)

Ed’s note [29/07/2009]: I had completely forgotten to mention the push mail support that works really well with the other web and corporate email services. I really liked the notification feature whereby I didn’t have to continually or even periodically check my mail. Instead, I was simply notified of mail and even tweets. Did I mention I really liked UberTwitter!

Bad

• weight and undesirable bulky size
• low resolution digital/video camera (the general argument here is that it is a business device, but this is the consumer oriented Storm
• no Wireless Networking, which is very very odd to leave out considering this is a consumer targeted device

The Storm would be a good device for users who are not supplied a corporate handset but would still like to keep connected via the corporate email yet have a device that can work well for personal day-to-day especially when the person is a connected Internet social butterfly.