BlackBerry Basics - #2 - An Introduction to the BlackBerry Storm

Hi! I’m Jay Goldman and welcome back to the Blackberry tips and tricks series.
Today, we’re going to look at the Blackberry Storm RIM’s touch screen Blackberry device. Now you may notice looking at that the Storm that there is no physical keyboard which makes it different than all the other Blackberries that are out there. Taking the keyboard away does give you a nice, big screen but it also means that all of the interactions have to be done using the touch screen including typing.

Let’s take a look, for example, at the Memo Pad application. Add a new memo and that will bring up the onscreen keyboard in portrait mode. This version of the keyboard uses RIM’s technology that includes two letters on each key and so the device will predict what you’re trying to type as you’re typing it. If I turn the device into landscape mode, the built-in accelerometer will automatically switch the keyboard to landscape mode and that gives me a full QWERTY keyboard.

This works the same way it does in the iPhone. The difference here is that the Storm’s touch screen includes two levels of touch sensitivity so I can hover over letters which will show a very slight blue glow behind them or I can actually click on letters and that will push the screen down, so that I know that I’ve clicked on them. You see that I’ve made a typing mistake there. But the Storm’s predictive type has corrected it for me to Butterscotch and I can select that just by tapping on it.

The Storm includes a number of ports around the outside edge as well as buttons that you can customize. So, on this side, we’ve got a headphone jack, volume up and down, and a convenience key and on this side, we’ve got a USB port and another convenience key. A special note about this USB port it’s not actually a standard mini or micro USB cable, but rather, a new version of USB that is starting to ship on some of the newer devices and accessories.

Make sure that you’ve got the right cable as it looks very similar; but if you grab the wrong one, you won’t be able to charge or sync your Storm. I can customize the function of those convenience keys using the Options application which might actually be inside of a folder in your applications section. Look for the Screening Keyboard Option and then scroll down to find the Right Side Convenience Key and Left Side Convenience Key Options. Those can be customized to select almost anything that’s installed on your Blackberry, as well as a number of functions like email settings or clock and camera.
Thanks for watching the Blackberry tips and tricks series. Stay tuned for more.


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