It is hard to exaggerate how important the BlackBerry Storm is RIM and Verizon. It is RIM’s bold effort to fend off the iPhone and Verizon is the best hope for a star handset is that people in, or at least keep them from bailing. The storm of the important innovation is what RIM calls SurePress-the entire screen is fat, Honkin ‘button, which coupled with a newly designed, finger-friendly BlackBerry OS. We have already showed you a lot of what the fuss is all about, but now that we spent some quality time with the non windstorm, here is the reason why we think it falls short of its promise.

The Body

It is surprisingly difficult. How, heavier than RIM’s board of Manly smartphone, the Bold to 5.47 ounces to 4.7 ounces’s Bold It feels fat, too, thicker than it actually is, because of its squarish shape. It looks good, it feels good in your hand. It’s just kind of clunky at the same time. On the other hand, but also all the substance of the storm feeling really robust. You’ll never feel like you’re going to break it.
The Screen button

If you push the screen and it clicks, it’s a really satisfying tactile sensation that, as I said in my hands on, is clearly a finely tuned experience. You will not accidentally press it if you do not mean, but you do not have a drop guns on him, either. Like the rest of the body, it is a rugged piece of hardware, as it seems in the course of many, many thousands of clicks it will endure in their life time. The only concern is that it seems like the gap between the screen and the rest of the body is a lint-nest waiting to happen. But the gap is big enough, you should be able to clean your pocket gunk with the edge of a toothpick.
The other buttons

For a touch-screen phone, the storm has a lot of damn keys. Nine, to be precise: The four standard BlackBerry buttons, a side button, a volume rocker and dedicated lock and mute buttons. I would not get rid of them. The BlackBerry key is still your best friend, because you still need to display in virtually any situation.
Screen

The storm has the largest, highest resolution screen, RIM has ever produced with a 480×360 res. It is bright and beautiful, though not quite as impressive as the Bold’s because they have a lower pixel density. Still, the OS and video fantastic look at it, with plenty of pop. The capacitive touch screen is quite respond on par with the T-Mobile G1 even if sometimes the operating system behind you.
Battery

We have not fully tested the battery life on the Storm yet, but it seems to be respectable. The battery is not quite as meaty as the power of the animal fat, but you should not have a huge problem getting through the day on one or all for free.
Network

No Wi-Fi is a Bumm, also with Verizon’s fantastic 3G network, ’cause they do not even penetrate everywhere. That said, one of the Storm’s biggest strengths is Verizon’s network, with its basically unbeatable coverage , And you get a signal everywhere that the majority is not a subway, plane or supervillian secret cave. 3G is much faster and more reliable than AT x26 T, it is sunshine. Pokiness in any Web browser is the Software fault. Demands sounded great, the other party if it sounded kind of muted, for me to the default volume in comparison with the Bold.

Camera

The camera is 3.2MP loud noise, like most mobile phone cameras. The camera is equipped with TARTED some basic image editing functions and a separate flash, but there is nothing unbelievable.
GPS

The GPS seems a fairly precise location with a reasonable amount of speed, though you’re stuck with Verizon’s VZ Navigator as the main navigation app (no BlackBerry Maps). Some people really hate Verizon program, so you also less than Stoked here.
OS and usability Interface

RIM’s BlackBerry first touchscreen not throw the baby out with the old keys (or something similar). It is very much the familiar BlackBerry OS, but with a UI that is optimized for your fingers fat. It is beautiful, with large, easy to press icons, many fade transition, as you are from screen to screen, and standard highlight motif of lighting up a Dr. Manhattan shade of blue when you something. It requires a little accustomed to the idea of highlighting something is really pushing it, but there is no BIGGIE.
The list menus like the pop-up menu when you use the BlackBerry button or lists of news Spacey are just enough to touch, without pressing the wrong thing very often. The accelerometer is pretty decent to keep with you and you rotate the screen in all four guidelines that allows you to the main four buttons on the left or right in portrait mode. It got stuck in the wrong direction less often than the iPhone has (for me at any rate), and this is a good thing, because the only way to use the full QWERTY keyboard is in the landscape. In portrait mode, only the keyboard is the SureType a virtual rendition of Pearl’s funky number letter pad.

The big question with the interface, at least in the main field, is that there are delays. Like, enough to be annoying. Scrolling through the main menu, for example, it seems like a part of the scroll-conscious slowdown is (I do not know why), but the inertia turned to choppiness more often than occasionally. The transition fades from screen to screen, not only in contradiction (sometimes you get ‘em, sometimes you do not), remove the OS actually feel slower. And if it was, it is somehow more frustrating because it makes you distrust and stock auer At the SurePress feedback is not good for your important selling point.

Stability

The Storm needed a bit more in the oven I had lotsa lock-ups and crashes in the last two days with him. Lag was all over the place, that is the cardinal mistake with a touch-based interface. There must be more stable. I wonder how long before there is a software update, “it must lead to a poorly.
The keyboard

The keyboard layouts themselves are spacious and perfectly, with the QWERTY subtly divided into two halves. What really makes for a good guide-Keep your thumbs on their respective sides of the divide and you’ll be a much happier camper when it comes to entering, you have to deliberately let the screen pop up between every letter press. After a real-changing rhythm between your thumb makes it much easier to operate, so that you do not try to press a button with your other thumb, while the screen is pushed in.
RIM makes a big deal out of the fact that they are separated from navigation to confirm their SurePress thing. That, hypothetically, is a means to an end, the end is more accurate than a standard input, feedbackless touch keyboard. In this context, it does not work. Even after two days, with the keyboard is great, perfect layout and size, I was equally hard to reject the AutoCorrect on the Storm than I ever had on the iPhone. Here’s why: I have pushed securing a key role not really tell me whether I have pushed the right. What makes the feedback, as far as typing on a keyboard is basically useless. It is made worse by the fact that RIM the glowing blue highlights are also far less effective than pop-up letters to indicating what button you press.

I hate to say this, but I kind of came to hate typing on them. Pushing the screen in ever and always requires much more effort than simply slid my fingers for a good touch keyboard. It was tiring. SurePress is a little less angry with the onscreen SureType keyboard in portrait mode. Another gripe is that you’re not a QWERTY keyboard in portrait mode, though its screen is as wide as the iPhone’s.

Other sensitivity

Copy and Paste! Yes, Storm has it. You highlight text using your finger on both sides of the text you want to highlight, then you have a small menu that appears below ask what you want to do. Your fingers are probably too big to do it right every time, but once you have learned the process to float, as you move the cursor with a long note, it’s easy and it works most of the time. Move the cursor within the text is not quite as intuitive as the iPhone look, but once you soar, to put it into cursor mode, the whole screen acts as a trackpad, so you can anywhere around him. It works. There are some other cool things here UI in your inbox, hovering over an e-mail brings everyone in this thread.
E-mail and Texting

It is a BlackBerry, so yes, the storm is everything you’d expect from an e-mail department, such as search, push, the execution, just touched with a touch UI. For example, the above simple search function, which is also a menu when you hover over the name of a person to do things like give them a MMS (take that iPhone!) Or in the contacts, which works very well with touch. Thank God, I saw that stood in the e-mail app far less than anywhere else in the phone it was always tough and really works with the touch UI. It is also still a few subtle aesthetic enhancements on the e-mail client in the Bold. I’d like threaded text messaging, but it is the standard BlackBerry setup here that looks like e-mail.
Calls and Visual Voicemail

The phone UI is pretty dandy, with huge buttons around and easy access to protocols, contacts, search and contact. Contacts is a fairly standard list of what to do with the search. Visual voice mail but that is a snazzy looking App. It is kind of busy, but I think it is a place I like the UI better than the iPhone.
Browser

The first thing I asked the rep RIM was how much better the Storm’s browser was considered the fat, what kind of eats it when it comes to scripts. He said that it has improved “but do not expect a miracle.” This is a good evaluation. It is fast, faster than the Bold, whenever I put them side by side, but not quite the fastest browser on the planet. It is also smarter than the fat, rendering pages more exactly where the fat slipped. Performance pages loaded once was good. I will do something more formal requirements, such as our older browser Battlemodo today, briefly.
RIM gets one thing right really is the browser user. You have a lot of opportunities to around two prominent in-and zoom-out buttons, plus you can enlarge by clicking. Quite simple. You have two main navigation modes when pan mode, where Swipe your finger zoom around the page, and cursor mode, where the whole screen acts as a trackpad. I mostly stuck with pan mode. SurePress comes in handy if you, because you never accidentally press a link back. One thing I would like multi-touch is zooming (sorry, gotta say it) and a way to quickly to the bottom of the page, as a hard patchwork not send you flying as on mobile safari. Overall, however, RIM provides quite big here.

Multimedia

The biggest improvement over the fat, media-wise, is that the storm comes with an 8 GB microSD card. Unfortunately, everywhere else it is usually the same. The media player UI is essentially identical, with minimal changes to make to touch. On the actual play screen, it’s okay, and album art looks great. However, the list system is pretty tired and just from the old BlackBerry PLAYBOOK in essence. The bigger pain point, if you compare with the iPhone multimedia muscles, is the crappy Roxio Media Manager. New phone, same crap. Please please please better media software, RIM this stuff is yours. Video looks really great on this screen but!
Apps

Okay, so you have Verizon Navigator as the main navigator App. It is okay and has some solid features, but not so easy to use as Google Maps. I did not roadtested it, but it is stronger than on other phones I have it on, and benefited from the storm the big screen.
They are probably happy if you see an icon in the main menu for the Application Center. The storm of the App Store is not. It is simply, where you can download Verizon and RIM approved in advance applications such as Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, Flickr, Facebook and the like (there are a lot of IM clients). It’s when you grab a software update for the phone, but do not expect that it often, updates are as few and far between. It is browser-based, which is annoying. The actual app store that you want, is not a single time until next year, and we are waiting impatiently for it. In the meantime, you can find BlackBerry applications to the ancient times, on the Internet.

Verdict

The storm is a strong effort from RIM, but it is not quite the killer phone, or Verizon that they need it. It is well-RIM clearly put a lot of thought into the design. But I think it fall short of what they were aiming, and ultimately, what all the hype is pushing the people to expect. Some of this is fixable: The damned thing needs to crash less often. But SurePress is not the end all, be-all of the touch-screen technology is not really an evolutionary step forward, too. The experience can be quite refined, but more polish is still needed. Storm Had this been left to brew a bit more, it would be much more powerful.

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