RIM BlackBerry Storm - Review

RIM BlackBerry Storm - Review Welcome to the PhoneArena.com video review for the Blackberry Storm 9530. The Storm is RIM’s response to the iPhone. There is no two ways about it. After declaring touch screens of pad, RIM realized that that may not be the case, and so started the development on one of their own. Of course, being Blackberry, they had to put their own twist on it. It uses the same capacity technology that the iPhone does however, instead of just touching an icon to select it, touching highlights it. You don’t have to press the screen, which is a whole click. It’s like one giant button. It’s a very unique technology something we’ve never seen before, and something quite frankly we despised. It’s good in theory because if you have accidentally touches something on the touch screen, and go on to menu or send a message that they didn’t mean too. However, their execution is flawed. To begin with, it’s tiring and this is the biggest complaint we have about it. It doesn’t sound like much, but when you actually used the device for a day or two, and you type out messages frequently your thumb gets fatigue. It’s not much of a press, but it’s definitely there. As you can see the interface is new as well. There’s really not a whole lot to say about it in terms of functionality as it’s basically just a port from previous OSS such as the 4.5 OS found on the Curve. However, everything is touch now, and there are a few little redesigns. We really do like the interface. The problem we have with it is that it can become leggy. There are often three to five second delays when going from menu to menu, and the accelerometer also is an issue. As you can see it takes sometime to flip, sometimes it goes instantaneously, sometimes it goes after five seconds, sometimes when we’re not moving the device at all, it just decides to switch orientation or when we do move the device, it decides not to switch back. Right now, it’s working pretty well, but they have even been sometimes when it won’t change at all. These are software issues and we expect RIM to update the software soon. There was rumor of a new one coming out however that turned out to be a missed put it on the sticker rather than downgraded the software. In terms of the design, the Bold is very nice. The one complaint we do have is the screen actually wiggles. There’s a lot of back and forth and up and down play. I’m not sure how much you can see here on the video, but the screen definitely moves and that was the very first thing we notice when taking the device up. It makes the otherwise well built device feel extremely — and what we realize s probably alleviate stress for the clickable touch screen, It just doesn’t feel good. We have the four navigational keys that we see on old Blackberries. However, this time there’s no track ball on the middle. This is kind of a shame and we’ve not to track on the past, but specially when held in the right orientation. We really thought about that the tract ball would be usable. The device is big, it’s about the same sizes as an iPhone however, it’s a full ounce heavier. It’s heavier than just about anything out there, and that’s the other thing we notice when first picking it up. We like heavy when it gives a quality feel and in fact, they are devices before because they are too light especially something like the Pearl, but the Bold is just too heavy. That said is well constructed. The 3.2-inch display is beautiful. It’s nice and clear and crisp with what they call a half VGA resolution. The back is very plain and simple. We do have a 3.2-megapixel auto focus camera with flash. The battery door is a large brass metal door and actually it has dual clips down on the side. Underneath we find the SIM slot. The — is an international device, and surprisingly is quad-band. It also has a slot for a microSD card and shifts with a more than ample eight-gigabyte card. Battery performance as expected with Blackberries is stellar and we achieved just the six hours of talk time that Blackberry claims. As you can see the accelerometer is having some issues as removing around. The buttons feel good, there’s no problem with them, on the side you’ll find the traditional convenience keys in volume rocker as well as the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. Overall, the Storm feels pretty good, and really it’s anything new functionality wise witht eh 4.7 interface. It’s very similar to the past Blackberry devices although I’m sure is pretty. It’s pretty obvious that RIM simply lacks the touch screen capability and therefore needed to upgrade to 4.7. It looks very similar to the 4.6 OS found on the Bold. There are some minor revisions to previous editions however, anybody that picked up a Blackberry before should be able to use the Storm with no problem. We’re looking at it in landscape orientation right now or we have a three back and forward grid You can see as we scroll up, the menu moves as well. It’s definitely not as smooth as we’ve seen on other touch screen devices most notably the iPhone. We actually have to click of course to select something. All the main things are here, we have our download and applications, the camera, clocks, Verizon added busy navigator in visual voicemail. The menu player is very good as you can see it looks similar in layout to previous ones though new icons. Let’s check out the music and see what we have. It’s very similar to that iPhone and the iPod interface in general. We had no problems with it registering the album mark and reading in the ID three tags. As you can see when we touch the screen it will bring up control, and we’ll see through the flip orientation off on the ground here that RIM know obviously. However, it looks very iPhony in its appearance. This is a good thing, is the iPhone pretty much set to the standard for that. It was brought back to videos and take a look at them as well. It had no problem playing any vertex files as you can see we used many different resolutions and frames for second options. We’ll pull up a video just to see what it looks like. We didn’t have some problems with the videos pointing up on screen controls. At times they were just fine but in other times there’s nothing. We’re sure this will be address int eh future updates. The next big improvement is the browser. In the past like grids have really been pretty cool on their browsing experience, but the Storms sets a new standard. In fact quite up there with the iPhone with the Touch Diamond with Opera mobile, but it’s very good. Sometimes page loaded quickly. We are on EVDO reversionary right now and very good coverage. As you can see our page loaded pretty quickly. There are other times however, in the same occasion we took upwards another minute and sometimes even beyond the minute to load the same page in the same location that run. Once you’re in the page you can scroll around, double tapping the screen we’ll zoom in. You can also ease the controls down at the bottom for more incremental zooms. Overall everything rendered quite nicely. This is definitely the best Blackberry experienced we have in terms of web browsing. The one issue we didn’t have is with YouTube videos while we can bring up movie YouTube and play the videos about without a problem, the quality was quite hoar that’s a minor gripe though. While YouTube is important it’s not something that’s going to make or break a device. We do like the interface, but our biggest complaint was the log. There are times when we simply found five, 10 seconds delays and we got tired of the little waiting icon. The last but not the least is the messaging. We pull out a touch message here and you can see the on screen keyboard. As you can see when you touch the key, it will highlight and then you actually have to click. The problem with this is that as you clicking away with any type of speed the device is just as not accurate at all. We are not exactly sure what the problem is whether it just has issues on registering process, whether it’s missing process or if we’re actually touching the screen in two places. Right now, we’re doing that but as you can see it’s only letting us go to one. Perhaps that we were keeping this our finger on the screen just a little too much, but we don’t out run this issue with past touch screen devices, so we’re not sure why the Bold is having so many problems. At the heart of any Blackberry’s messaging and at the heart of messaging is a keyboard. This is where the Storm fails tremendously. We’ve use the device for several days now, but no matter how hard we try, we just can’t type quickly with any type of accuracy. Messages as you can see with some of the words on the screen on now turned out the risks. Auto correct does best to keep up with this, but there are times that it is so bad it doesn’t need to try. We’re very familiar with touch screen devices. We personally carry two right now and we review countless numbers of them. This is hence down the worst when we’ve never tried. We’re not sure exactly what the problem is, as we’re typing the highlight does look like it’s typing the letter that we’re asking it too or at least highlighting the letters is ask it to do. We don’t know if something is lost in the screen press or not. We really just have no idea what’s going on it’s that bad all around. The feel is good. It does feel like a normal keyboard and that’s what RIM is going for, but it doesn’t work like a normal keyboard. The spacing is found on the full QWERTY. If we switch the orientation here, we’ll see we have a T nine keyboard in portrait mode as well as a short type option. The problem is not in the designed, the problem is in the execution. We really hope RIM addresses this quickly because this is pretty unusable for someone who can type with any speed or whatsoever. As we slowdown our speed we became more and more accurate however, that’s not what a Blackberry is about. A Blackberry is about tapping out a 100 hundred pin messages and emails and tons of messages a day. The other problem with this was fatigue. After just five or 10 messages we started to feel out thumb gets soar and after full day with it they were tired, there’s no doubt about that. The device maybe great for thumb workouts, but you shouldn’t be tired after typing out emails. Business users who are using this frequently will hate it. We really can’t say how bad this keyboard is. It’s something that we just can’t believe RIM let out the door. We hope they’ll address this quickly. They have been served supposed the iPhone killers since the device was first released. Some of them do a good job, but none of them quite meets the overall mark that Apple set. Don’t get us wrong, there are several things that we’d like to see in the iPhone, and from our review you can see we’re kind of disappoint in the 3G, but on the whole it’s the best device out there. We really had high hope for the Storm. RIM is a great company. They have been putting out Smartphone products for years that lead the market. We thought with all their expertise they might actually be able to get it right instead this might just be the worst one out there all things considered. The multimedia is fantastic, there’s no way around that. The screen looks great, videos are crisp and the music player is well executed however, RIM lost its way with the Storm. Blackberries have always been Blackberries, and they have always been different in any other PDA device out there. They’ve been set apart by their messaging and email capabilities while the Storm still takes advantage of biz and buzz meaning email push is fantastic, the keyboard is just terrible. It’s incredibly inaccurate and very tiresome to use. Those looking to type out emails will find their thumbs hurting. Heavy text messengers will see the same. There’s just no two ways about it. The Storm is a terrible messaging device. If just looking for something to check your email now and again and you want to replace your iPod, the Storm is a great device and you probably like it. The phone performance is outstanding and battery life is stellar however, if you’re Blackberry user looking to upgrade, hang on to your Curve or whatever else you’re using. It’s certainly better than the Storm.