Ok, I know that we usually don’t post stuff like this, but I wanted to put together a quick little review about our new phones from Blackberry, the Storm. Crystal and I gave each other early Christmas presents in the form of the Blackberry Storm. If you know any of the hype behind this phone, then you know folks are touting this as an IPhone killer. I’ll tell you up front that it really is… and really is not.
I won’t go into detail with the phone specs and everything. If your interested in the phone, then you already know the specs or can easily google them. Listed below are quick like, dislikes, and overall impressions.
Likes:
Screen – Big and beautiful. A tiny-bit smaller than IPhone, but higher pixel density. Crisp and clear.
Email – Like every BB, email and messaging is exquisite!
Web speed – 3g rocks, and I hate to admit that Verizon’s network is fast and well-covered.
Web browsing – Really nice. Real HTML. Navigating can be a little funky until you get used the interface quirks (more on that later)
Phone – Sound is on par with my old BB Curve. Very nice.
Speaker – Considering the speaker is tiny, it’s very good. Speakerphone is clear.
Memory – It comes with an 8gig microSD card and you don’t have to pull the battery to get to it if you want to change it out.
Touch Screen - Takes a bit to get used to is you come from using an IPod Touch or IPhone. It works great and the tactile feedback of the “click is very nice”. Just be warned that this may be an aquired taste and take a day or two to fully get used to.
UI – Classic Blackberry with a twist. Very nice except with the problems listed below.
Keyboard – In landscape mode, it works great.
Oh yeah… Cut/Paste!!! – I am stoked about something so minuscule. IPhone REALLY needs this.
Dislikes:
UI - They needed to bake the user interface a bit longer. It has a potential to be very nice, but there are noticeable lag at times that can be frustrating. BB should address this and other probs in future updates (I really hope!).
Keyboard – I love the full QWERTY keyboard in landscape, but in portrait mode, they went with the same setup as the Pearl with 2 letters per number. Works good for basic typing, but for words not in it’s library, it’s a pain for me. Hopefully they add full qwerty to portrait mode in updates.
Applications – Most of my old BB apps I have downloaded don’t work, or don’t work properly because of the new screen size and interface. I’m not overly worried about it though, I can see that there will be a ton more apps eventually that wouldn’t have been written for BB until the Storm came a long.
Lack of Flash support – This may sound familiar to IPhone owners. It doesn’t support Flash yet. This gets my goat. I guess that BB and Apple never got the memo, but Flash is mainstream now. It’s not some obscure plugin it was 10 years ago. I pray to the mobile phone gods that they correct this glaring mistake omission better than later!
Overall:
I give it a basic thumbs up. I don’t think it will be an IPhone killer, but it will do very well and be a viable alternative to those who don’t want to be with AT&T. You can’t beat Blackberrys’ email services. Rock-on! My only real gripe is with Blackberry for releasing the Storm before it was really ready. At times, I feel like I’m using an Alpha development device and not even a beta version. The UI CAN be wonderful, but with lags, glitches, and long hangs, it needs to be put back in the oven for a bit longer to bake.
Don’t get me wrong. The phone is nice and it works pretty good. It can just be a little annoying sometimes. Both Crystal and I like it and will hopefully completely love it when they address some of it’s quirks with updates.