Digital Trends

Blackberry Storm

November 21st, 2008 | by John Brandon

Features and Design

The first thing you’ll notice about the Storm, before you even turn it on, is that the handset is somewhat heavy and bulky. RIM chose to include an extended battery with this model, presumably to appease both consumers and business users who want to: A. watch a lot of movies and listen to music or B. surf the Web in their lonely hotel rooms all evening. Translation: Size-wise, it’s a beast. The Storm weighs almost 5.5 ounces (5.46 to be exact) and measures 4.4” x 2.4” x .55” (LxWxD), or almost a half-inch thick. Read: It’s a rock in a pants pocket and doesn’t work that well in your shirt pocket either.

When you first hold one, your gut reaction’s going to be as follows – holy guacamole, what accessories will I need to make the phone fit in with my daily routine? We did a sanity check with a few typical business users who were surprised at the device’s bulk, then later realized its extra features and large battery were perks that helped offset such downsides. That said, realize: The handset is absolutely, positively, 100% not made for teenagers who might lose their cell phone.

There are just a handful of hardware buttons on the Storm: A phone dial and end call button; the menu key (common on BlackBerry models); escape key; a voice dial button on the left side; a camera button on the right side; a lock and a mute button on top; and volume controls that are located on the right side. Both the lock and mute buttons are easy to miss because they are recessed into the casing. 

Setup and Use

Of course, once you power up the Storm, the real fun begins – in more ways than one, and not always in a positive sense. As a basic introduction, here’s what you get for the low, low price of $200 (plus two-year Verizon Wireless contract): The Storm includes a 3.2 megapixel camera; GPS with voice navigation; 1GB of on-board memory; a battery that lasts six hours; a bright 3.25” 480x360 color display that supports over 65,000 colors; Bluetooth 2.0 with stereo audio; GSM and EV-DO Rev A; a microSD slot; and a standard size 3.5mm headphone jack (earbud headphones included). The only conspicuously absent spec is WiFi, which seems to be the hit-or-miss wireless option on many smartphones.

So, how could you go wrong with all of these features? For starters, the main issue with the Storm is that the touchscreen is very hard to use, even with some practice. It’s not even a good first effort for RIM, who is obviously learning the ropes as far as hardware design goes here, as well as how to make best use of such gizmos’ underlying software. Be aware: When you poke an on-screen prompt, you are pressing down on the entire screen as if it were a button itself (almost like clicking on a mouse), and the phone is registering where you prod.

By contrast, the iPhone and G1 accomplish the same thing without resorting to physical feedback. If you drag your finger too far and then click, for example, you will constantly press the wrong key. Worse, the visceral feedback is more of a thud than a buzz. At least with the Samsung Instinct, which also provides some tactile response using haptic technology, you get a little kickback. The touchscreen on the Storm won’t help you type faster either – it’s more of an annoyance than an aid. Even simple tasks such as typing in a URL or dragging web browser displays up and down prove a major chore.

We invited a few friends to test out the touchscreen functionality, and in every case, complaints quickly followed. No one liked the system in general, and none of our testers could type fast using the device. If you’re a BlackBerry fan because products in this hardware line let you tap-tap-tap up a storm with your thumbs, welcome to your worst nightmare. The one saving grace is that the phone dialer does work really well for making phone calls. (RIM calls the touchscreen technology “SurePress,” and it does help when dialing numbers.) However, the keypad is just not that useful. Along the same lines, in portrait mode, the Storm provides a SureType keyboard that predicts what you type (at least, it tries to help). You can also enable multi-tap, the normal mode for most cell phones where you press a key several times for the letter you want.

Moving right along, if you turn the phone to the side, the Storm will switch to landscape mode automatically (using the accelerometer) with a full keyboard. But the keys are too small, and clicking the screen is a pain, so the cumulative effect is that the Storm works poorly for e-mail functions however you choose to access them. Also, it doesn’t always register with the Blackberry OS when you turn the phone, so you if you want to use the landscape mode option, you sometimes have to turn the device faster or repeat the action several times. RIM offers a few neat tricks – you can hover your finger over the cursor to “pick it up” and move it to another part of a field and enjoy a simple way to search for email addresses. The Storm does not support multi-touch gestures, however, so you can’t zoom in by spreading out two fingers on the screen. To zoom in, you instead tap the screen twice and, to zoom out, you press Escape. You can swipe and drag images and browser windows, however. It’s an unusual “hover your finger, then click” operation that is difficult to learn and not that intuitive.

Image Courtesy of RIM