BlackBerry Storm 9500 Review

By Steve & Kylie Jurgensen

First Impressions

MyMobile Verdict

Even before the Storm, Research in Motion had cornered the market on calling and messaging functionality. Quite simply, BlackBerry devices do it all and better than anyone else, and if you don’t like a feature, you can usually change it or buy a third-party app to fix it. So that’s why business users buy them. But why would average Joe cough up for a BlackBerry? The main attraction for us has been the BlackBerry Curve’s QWERTY keyboard and itreally- works trackball navigation, along with the integrated messaging interface. After the Curve, the Bold has an even bigger keyboard and unbeatable display, so what more could you want? Well, just like in the Garden of Eden, it came down to an Apple. The media savvy iPhone arrived with eye-popping graphics, a full-size touch screen, and some deliciously smooth finger moves that belied its virginal white exterior. We love the whole swipe-and-tap navigation thing, and the design is just so beautiful. But when it comes to inputting text, the iPhone leaves us stone cold at best and incredibly frustrated at worst. Thus we had high hopes for the Storm. This was going to merge / amalgamate / combine / incorporate / synthesise all our favourite technology and design elements into one über-mobile. Ditch the Apple, abandon the Bold, and succumb to the Storm. Officially designated the BlackBerry 9500, the Storm certainly has the looks. Designed for consumer appeal, it has a glossy black glass and steel exterior with smoked chrome trim. It’s not small or light, but you forgive all when you see the size of that screen. And that glass expanse is not just pretty, it goes one up on the iPhone, with responsive,clickable technology. Which is a discussion all of its own.

Navigation

If you love your physical QWERTY keypad, it may take a while to get used to tapping on a smooth surface. The Storm offers unique tactile feedback with a clickable screen that acts like one giant button and track pad. To highlight items, scroll or move through screens, you touch or swipe your finger on the screen surface without clicking it. Highlighted items glow a ghostly blue so you know you’ve got the right item. To select, press firmly enough to make the whole screen click down fractionally and back up again. The idea is that by actually having to press harder to confirm a selection, you don’t inadvertently select things when you’re swiping to navigate. We like the concept but found it a bumpy ride compared to navigating the iPhone. Scrolling around was frequently choppy, and it got a bit frustrating trying to select anything smaller than a fingertip without grabbing its neighbours by mistake. We really missed the trackball found on previous BlackBerry mobiles when it came to rolling through menus. Things got considerably better when we found our way to the Options > Screen/Keyboard menu, where you can adjust tap interval, hover point and swipe sensitivity to suit. And if you tip the Storm to portrait orientation, the keyboard automatically changes to a virtual alphanumeric keypad that can be used in standard texting (Multitap) mode, or in SureType mode. 

Calling & Messaging

The Storm has all the messaging functionality technology can currently offer, but even with a responsive screen we didn’t enjoy typing on the virtual keyboard. Other touch screen innovations, like being able to hover over an email to bring up the entire thread or hovering over a Contact to pull up a quick menu and send a message, added some value. But this wasn’t enough to offset the slightly wearing effect of stumbling through the process of typing a message with frequent miss-taps and frustrating lags while we found our way around.
Phoning, on the other hand, is everything you could hope for. The calling interface gives you speaker, mute, flash, and “add participant” keys right under your nose when you make a call, as well as shortcuts to options such as the Keypad, Notes, Home, Calendar and Contacts. Audio is great for both caller and recipient, and even the hard of hearing will pick up this speaker phone. You can multitask while you chat too, but you can’t do data and voice at the same time.
The Storm is a truly global beast, and will give you great performance on just about any network: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, UMTS/HSPA 2100.   

Multimedia 

Watching video on the Storm is a thrilling experience. This wee device really can rock your pocket, with full stereo sound that is only betrayed by the slightest hint of tinniness in the high ranges. But when you see the graphics letting rip on the 3.25” glass LCD display with 480 x 360 resolution, at 184 pixels per inch, you’ll be so engrossed in the movie you won’t really care. Supported video formats include MPEG4 H.263, MPEG4 Part 2 Simple Profile, H.264, and WMV. You can capture video too, with a simple interface that gives you a clear picture of your footage and intuitively positioned buttons for operating the camera and saving to file or message.
The media player on the Storm is not particularly innovative. Roxio Media Manager returns, for better or worse. The display shows off album art to full advantage in full size, the touch screen music controls are large and clickable, or you can use the dedicated controls. The audio is as good as your headset, and you can tweak it with the on-board equaliser and 11 preset filters. There’s a 3.5mm audio headset socket as well as support for stereo Bluetooth, and an 8GB microSD card boosts the 1GB of internal memory, and pretty much makes the lack of hotswappability a non-issue. Audio formats supported include MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA and WMA ProPlus.
The Storm features a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and lots of settings to play with, which is just as well – if you want better than average pictures, you are going to need to do a fair amount of playing. Point-and-click will give you blurry patches, faded colours and heaps of noise. However, you won’t do better than the Storm for ease of snapping and flicking it out to your social network.  

Other Features

Surfing the Storm is fast, and looks as fresh as that gorgeous screen can deliver. The touch screen brings some new navigating tools too, with a choice of Pan or Cursor mode. Pan enables you to move the page around with a fingertip, and Cursor turns the page into a trackpad. The clickable screen stops you from accidentally clicking links while you’re zooming around, and you can select chunks of text by touching at the beginning and end simultaneously. The browser is not the best on the market but better than any other BlackBerry, in our opinion, and does a good job of rendering most web pages accurately.
The on-board GPS does a sterling job when hitched to Google Maps. We tested it in urban and rural contexts and were impressed.
With the Storm synced up with your workspace, you can have all your files at your fingertips no matter where you are, e.g. Contacts, Word, PDFs and zip files. With the bundled version of Dataviz Documents to Go, you can read and edit but not create, so you’ll need to get the upgrade to edit your documents. But that’s not the only problem. Coming back to the keyboard issue, we wouldn’t want to have to create or make significant changes to documents using the touch screen keyboard. Reading and navigating documents on the other hand? What a pleasure.
Bundled games are Word Mole and BrickBreaker. So if your Storm is a pleasure machine, you are going to want to put that abundant memory and glorious display to use adding more games than those supplied. And if you’ve moved beyond SMS, MMS, IM, email and video calling into the whole social networking scene, you’ll be rapt to find not only MySpace, Flickr and Facebook preloaded but far more usable on the Storm than on any of its competitors.  

SUMMARY

Navigating the Storm is a radical departure from the usual BlackBerry, due to the full size touch screen, and the loss of our beloved orb trackball from the standard navigation cluster. If you rely heavily on your smart phone for creating large amounts of text, you should test to see whether you’re compatible with the Storm’s keyboard before you take the plunge. And there’s no Wi-Fi, which could be a deal-breaker for some. The Storm brings you big sound, breathtaking visuals, lightning speed and everything you need to work, play, connect, dream and organise your life. It’s beautiful, well built and fully customisable. If you’ve been a BlackBerry hater up till now, the Storm will win you over. Give in to your dark side.

MyMobile Verdict