Gizmodo  -
2 days and 19 hours ago
pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/blackberrystorm.jpg" align="left"
hspace="4" vspace="2" width="804" height="613" style="display:block;float:none;" /It's hard to
overstate how important the BlackBerry Storm is to RIM and Verizon. It's RIM's bold effort to fend
off the iPhone and Verizon's best hope for a star handset that draws people in, or at least keeps
them from bailing. The Storm's major innovation is what RIM calls SurePressmdash;the entire
touchscreen is fat, honkin' buttonmdash;which has been paired with a redesigned, finger-friendly
BlackBerry OS. We've already a
href="http://gizmodo.com/5060378/blackberry-storm-first-hands-on"showed you a lot of/a what the
fuss is all about, but now that we've spent some quality, uninterrupted time with the Storm, here's
why we think it falls short of its promise./p pstrongThe Hardware/strongbr strongThe Body/strongbr
It's surprisingly heavy. Like, heavier than RIM's manly slab of smartphone, a
href="http://gizmodo.com/tag/blackberry-bold"the Bold/a, at 5.47 oz to the Bold's 4.7 oz. It feels
thick, too, thicker than it actually is, because of its squarish shape. It looks good, it feels
okay in your hand. It's just kind of clunky at the same time. On the other hand though, all this
substance also makes the Storm feel really robust. You'll never feel like you're going to break
it./p pstrongThat Button Screen/strongbr When you push the screen and it clicks, it's a genuinely
satisfying tactile sensation that, as I said in my hands on, is clearly a finely tuned experience.
You won't accidentally press it when you don't mean to, but you don't have to drop a sledgehammer
on it, either. Like the rest of the body, it's a sturdy piece of hardware that seems like it will
hold up over the many, many thousands of clicks it will endure in its life time. The only concern
is that it seems like the chasm between the screen and rest of the body is a lint nest waiting to
happen. But the gap is large enough you should be able to clean your pocket gunk out with the edge
of a toothpick./p pstrongThe Other Buttons/strongbr For a touchscreen phone, the Storm has a lot of
damn buttons. Nine, to be exact: The four standard BlackBerry buttons, one side button, a volume
rocker, and dedicated lock and mute keys. I wouldn't get rid of any of them. The BlackBerry button
is still your best friend, since you'll still need to bring up the menu in practically every
situation./p pstrongScreen/strongbr The Storm has the biggest, highest resolution screen RIM has
ever produced with a 480x360 res. It's bright and beautiful, though not quite as stunning as the
Bold's since it has a lower pixel density. Still, the OS and video look fantastic on it, with
plenty of pop. The capacitive touchscreen is fairly responsivemdash;on par with the T-Mobile
G1mdash;though sometimes the OS lags behind you./p pstrongBattery/strongbr We haven't fully tested
the battery life on the Storm yet, but it seems to be respectable. The battery isn't quite as beefy
as the beast powering the Bold, but you shouldn't have a HUGE problem getting through the day on
one charge or anything./p pstrongNetwork/strongbr No Wi-Fi is a bummer, even with Verizon's
fantastic 3G network, 'cause not even it penetrates everywhere. That said, one of the Storm's
greatest strengths is Verizon's network, with its basically unbeatable coverage, and you'll get a
signal most everywhere that's not a subway, airplane or supervillian secret lair. 3G is plenty fast
and more reliable than ATT, so it's been sunshine. Any pokiness in web browsing is the software's
fault. Calls sounded great to the other party, though kind of muted to me compared to the Bold or
iPhone./p pstrongCamera/strongbr The camera is 3.2MP of noisy noise, like most cellphone cameras.
The camera is tarted up with some basic photo editing features and a dedicated flash, but it's
nothing incredible./p pstrongGPS/strongbr The GPS seems to provide a pretty accurate 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's program, so you might be
less than a happy camper here./p pstrongOS and Usability/strongbr strongInterface/strongbr RIM's
first touchscreen BlackBerry doesn't toss the old baby out with the buttons (or something like
that). It's very much the familiar BlackBerry OS, just with a UI that's been optimized for your fat
fingers. It's pretty, with big, easy-to-press icons, lots of fade transition as you move from
screen to screen, and standard highlight motif of lighting up a Dr. Manhattan shade of blue
whenever you select something./p pThe list menusmdash;like the menu pop up when you press the
BlackBerry button or lists of messagesmdash;are just spacey enough to be touchable without pressing
thing very often. The accelerometer is pretty decent at keeping up with you and will rotate the
screen in all four orientations, letting you choose to the have the four main buttons on the left
or right in portrait mode. It got "stuck" in the wrong orientation less often than the iPhone does
(to me anyway), which is good, since the only way to use the QWERTY keyboard is in landscape (or
conversely, SureType in portrait)./p pThe major issue with the interface, at least in the main menu
area, is that lags. Like, enough to be annoying. Scrolling through the main menu, for instance, it
seems like part of the scroll slowdown is built in (I don't know why) but it got choppy more often
than occasionally. The transition fades from screen to screen, besides being inconsistent
(sometimes you get 'em, sometimes you don't), make the OS actually feel slower. And when it does
lag, it's somehow more frustrating because it makes you distrust and pissed off at the SurePress
feedbackmdash;not good for your major selling point./p pstrongStability/strongbr The Storm needed a
little bit longer in the ovenmdash;I had lotsa lock-ups and crashes over the last two days with it.
Lag was all over the place, which is a cardinal sin with a touch-based UI. It really needs to be
more stable. I wonder how long before there's a software update, 'cause it needs one badly./p
pstrongThe Keyboard/strongbr The keyboard layouts themselves are roomy and perfect, with the QWERTY
subtly divided into two halves. Which actually makes for a good guidelinemdash;keep your thumbs on
their respective sides of the divide and you'll be a much happier camper when it comes to typing,
since you have to consciously let the screen pop back up between every letter press. Having a true
alternating rhythm between your thumbs makes it much easier to use, so you're trying to press a key
with your other thumb while the screen's already pushed in./p pRIM makes a big deal out of the fact
they've separated navigation from confirmation with their SurePress thing. That, hypothetically, is
a means to an end, the end being more accurate typing than a standard, feedbackless touch keyboard.
In that respect, it fails. Even after two days, with the keyboard's great layout and perfect size,
I was leaning just as hard on the autocorrect on the Storm as I ever did on the iPhone. Here's why:
Confirming I've pushed a key doesn't actually tell me whether I've pushed the right one. Which
makes the feedback, as far as typing on a keyboard goes, basically useless. It's made worse by the
fact that RIM's glowing blue highlights also are far less effective than pop up letters at
indicating what key you're pushing./p pI hate to say this, but I kind of came to hate typing on it.
Pushing the screen in over and over requires so much more effort than simply gliding my fingers
around a good touch keyboard. It was tiring. SurePress is a bit less annoying with the onscreen
SureType keyboard in portrait mode though. One other gripe is that you can't get a QWERTY keyboard
in portrait, even though its screen is as wide as the iPhone's./p pstrongOther Touchiness/strongbr
Copy and paste! Yeah, Storm's got it. You highlight text by putting your fingers on either side of
the text you want to highlight, then you've got a little menu that pops up below asking what you
want to do with it. Your fingers are probably too big to do it correctly every time, but once
you've learned the process of how to float the cursor with a long touch, it's easy and it works
most of the time. Moving the cursor around within text isn't quite as intuitive as the iPhone's
magnifying glass, but once you hover to take it into cursor mode, the whole screen acts like a
trackpad, so you can move anywhere around it. It works. There are some other cool UI things
heremdash;in your inbox, hovering over an email will bring up every one in that thread./p
pstrongEmail and Texting/strongbr It's a BlackBerry, so yes, the Storm is everything you'd expect
from one in the email department, like search, push, the works, just touched up with a touch UI.
For instance, the aforementioned easy search feature, which also bring a menu when you hover over a
person's name to do things like send them an MMS (take that iPhone!) or add to contacts that works
really well with touch. Thankfully, I saw lag in the email app far less than anywhere else in the
phonemdash;it was always snappy, and works really with the touch UI. It's also got a few subtle
aesthetic enhancements over the email client in the Bold. I'd like threaded text messaging, but
it's the standard BlackBerry setup here that looks just like email./p pstrongCalling and Visual
Voicemail/strongbr The phone UI is pretty dandy, with giant buttons all around and easy access to
logs, contacts, and contact search. Contacts is a fairly standard list thing with search. Visual
voicemail though, that is a snazzy looking app. It's kind of busy, but I think it's one place I
like the UI better than the iPhone./p pstrongBrowser/strongbr The first thing I asked the RIM rep
was how much better the Storm's browser was than the Bold, which kind of eats it when it comes to
scripts. He said it was improved "but don't expect a miracle." That's a good assessment. It's fast,
faster than the Bold whenever I put them side by side, but not quite the fastest browser on the
planet. It's also smarter than the Bold, rendering pages more accurately where the Bold slipped.
Performance once pages loaded was good. I'll be doing some more formal benchmarks, like with our
browser Battlemodo earlier today, shortly./p pOne thing RIM gets really right is the browser UI.
You have lots of of options for getting aroundmdash;two prominent zoom in and out buttons, plus you
can zoom by clicking. Very easy. You've got two main navigation modes thoughmdash;pan mode, where
your finger swipes zoom around the page, and cursor mode, where the whole screen acts like a
trackpad. I mostly stuck with pan mode. SurePress comes in handy when scrolling, because you'll
never accidentally press a link again. One thing I'd like is multitouch zooming (sorry, gotta say
it) and a way to quickly get to the bottom of the page, since a hard flick doesn't send you flying
like on mobile Safari. Overall though, RIM delivers pretty big here./p pstrongMultimedia/strongbr
The biggest improvement over the Bold is that the Storm comes with an 8GB microSD card.
Unfortunately, everywhere else, it's mostly the same. The media player UI is essentially identical,
with minimal tweaks to make it touchable. On the actual playback screen, it's fine, and album art
looks great. However, the list system it uses is fairly tired and straight out of the old
BlackBerry playbook essentially. The bigger pain point, if you're comparing it to the iPhone's
multimedia muscle, is the crappy Roxio Media Mananger. New phone, same crap. Please please please
get better media software RIM, this stuff is beneath you. Video looks really great though on that
screen!/p pstrongApps/strongbr Okay, so you've got Verizon's Navigator as the main navigator app.
It's okay and has some solid features, but not as easy to use as Google Maps. I haven't roadtest
it, but it's more responsive than on other phones I've used it on, and benefits from the Storm's
big screen./p pYou'll probably be excited when you see an icon in the main menu for the Application
Center. The Storm's App Store it is not. It's just where you can download Verizon and RIM's
pre-approved apps like Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger, Flickr, Facebook and the like (there are
a lot of IM clients). It's where you'll grab software updates for the phone, but don't expect to be
using it frequently since updates will be few and far between. It's browser based, which is
annoying. The actual app store, the one you want, won't hit until next year, and we're waiting
impatiently for it. In the meantime, you can find BlackBerry apps the old fashioned way, on the
internets./p pstrongVerdict/strongbr The Storm is a strong effort from RIM, but it's not quite the
killer phone that they or Verizon need it to be. It's goodmdash;RIM clearly put a lot of thought
into the design. But I think it fall short of what they were aiming for, and ultimately what all
the hype is driving people to expect. For one, the damn thing needs to crash less often. SurePress
is not the end-all, be-all of touchscreen technologiesmdash;it's not really an evolutionary step
forward, even. The experience is fairly refined, but it could still use some more polish. Had this
Storm been left to brew a bit longer, it would've been much more powerful./p br style="clear:
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