BlackBerry Storm random thoughts
Posted on 27 November 2008, at 6:28 am, by Wayne Schulz
My college roommate upgraded to a BlackBerry Storm on Monday. In light of the stinging review in today’s New York Times, I just had to pay him a visit for some hands on time with the new BlackBerry to see what all the fuss was about. As you know, the BlackBerry Storm is Research in Motion’s first try at a touch screen device. I didn’t work with it long enough to tell if there are stability issues. Speed seemed adequate, if a little laggy in places, but I still think there’s one big missing feature that hardly anyone has talked about.
Take a look at the image above. On the left is the Facebook application for BlackBerry as accessed via the menu on the Storm. It actually leads you to a quaint 1980’s-ish looking mobile optimized site.
On the right is my iPhone with the Facebook application loaded. From within the iPhone application I can do almost anything that I can do on the desktop including chat and picture uploads.
This is probably the BlackBerry Storm’s biggest weakness. There simply aren’t as many applications that take advantage of the larger BlackBerry Storm screen. And I question whether there EVER will be.
The BlackBerry Facebook application is embarrassingly bare bones. And BlackBerry has been out far longer than iPhone. Take a look in the iPhone App Store and compare it to what’s available for the BlackBerry Storm.
I love that the BlackBerry Bold has a removable battery. In my opinion the iPhone 3G should have had one too. Apple made a mistake in not designing the device to facilitate a removable battery.
I like that when you rotate the BlackBerry Storm to landscape that the keyboard becomes a full QWERTY layout. I think the portrait mode where the keyboard is a SURETYPE layout will turn a lot of people off. It’s simply too hard to type with the Suretype keypad in portrait – especially for abbreviations.
Based on about 1/2 hour of typing, I think ultimately my accuracy on the BlackBerry Storm would not be any better or worse than on the iPhone. The biggest problem I had with the Storm was the same issue that the New York Times raised. There’s not much reason for requiring anyone to press the screen lightly first and then harder to click the key. I didn’t find the feedback of pressing the keys any more helpful than pressing on the regular iPhone touch screen.
The BlackBerry Storm has a few other weaknesses that turn me off:
- Lacks Wi-Fi support (the next biggest flaw aside from lack of apps)
- Can’t play iTunes purchased (DRM protected) music
- Suretype keyboard in portrait orientation
-
Recommendations:
The BlackBerry Storm is good for you if:
You are in the middle of a Verizon contract
and
You want a large screen BlackBerry
and
You won’t send many emails or expect to take many notes
and
You don’t care about running third party applications
Otherwise, there are many other better choices. For heavy emailers and BlackBerry addicts – Amazon has lots of BlackBerry devices on sale that are free or up to $99 BACK after rebate.
If you need the latest model BlackBerry – consider the BlackBerry Bold which includes Wi-Fi and the latest OS that will run all the same applications as the Storm.
Amazon has BlackBerry Storm – $199 (no rebate) or BlackBerry 8830 for $179 or BlackBerry 8330 Curve for .01
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December 10th, 2008 at 9:04 pm
In regards to the Storm not having as many applications as the iPhone…. you do realize when the iPhone came out there were no apps for it as well, right? In fact, it wasn’t for about year before the AppStore became available. So why not give it some time before using that as your number one argument?
January 9th, 2009 at 1:54 am
FYI – that is not the Blackberry Facebook App. That is the internal browser showing a mobile version of Facebook.
February 22nd, 2009 at 9:07 pm
LOL Blackberry Is A Business Purpose Phone Only, And Now There Trying To Make It More User Friendly,(Which Doesn't Seem To Be Working Very Well) Apples First Phone was near flawless with technology that still to this day blows any other phone out of the water. Considering technology changes every 3 months its been awhile since iphone came out and there only making it better lol.
ALSO you could download apps through Installer when the 2g iphone came out so almost right away after its launch it had 3rd party apps, all you had to do was jailbreak another feature that blew me away. Iphone is much more user friendly and you can have unlimited fun with it by download apps daily
February 27th, 2009 at 1:15 am
As an update to this story. My college roommate is the one who bought the BlackBerry Storm. I went and spent some time with it (and photographed it for this brief article).
Fast forward two months or so and he's since sold it and bought a Curve.
March 6th, 2009 at 3:12 am
um…it can play itunes purchased music…not all of it but most of it