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Blackberry Storm Smartphone For Business – Storm In A Teacup?
The Blackberry Storm was the first Smart Phone released by RIM, reputedly as a response to the release of the i-phone by Apple.
Although it has some great features it doesn’t quite fit the bill and isn’t quite as impressive as the later Blackberry Curve 8520 and probably not quite as useful for business mobile phone users it is never the less a pretty nice phone.
There is no argument that the Blackberry Storm is a sexy, good looking phone. It’s a similar size to the i-phone – just a little bit shorter, but slightly wider and thicker. The face of the phone has a nice 3.2-inch touch screen and beneath this are four buttons including: a send key, an end key, a BlackBerry menu key, and a back key – the buttons are made of hardened rubber and sit nicely with the screen and feel good in the hand, it is also a comfortable size and not too much to have in the pocket.
The screen has a good quality, perfectly snsitive touch screen that glows up in blue when you touch one of the buttons. When the screen is clicked it makes a light click sound which makes it feel like real typing on a computer keyboard.
The Blackberry Storm, like most Smartphones also has an accelerometer, which, when you rotate the phone round it changes the orientation of the phone. However we did find that some of the keys are a lttle close together so not great for heavy business mobile phone users.
Another issue that I had with the Blackberry Storm was that it has two menu systems – both icons and folders. It is a bit like websites that cannot decide where to have their navigation menus, on the left or at the top so just go for both.
Although this can sometimes be handy as it covers the needs of users who have a preference for each type of navigation it can get a little confusing, especially as some of the duplicated folders have slightly different names.
In terms of making calls, the Blackberry Storm was absolutely fine and with a clear sound. One problem was that the volume didn’t seem to be quite loud enough. As well as this the touchscreen was quite sensitive so when the phone is held close to the head when speaking it is all too easy to accidentally press buttons unintentionally; which is obviously a faux pas for business mobile users who have a lot of important client calls on the go.
Browsing was easy and good as you are able to zoom in and out of web pages using the buttons at the bottom but the phone does lack support for WiFi networks, so are heavily reliant on the £G network for good web access.
All Blackberry mobile phones have an excellent set up for both messaging with email and text. The Storm can use up to 10 seperate email accounts for individuals who need to use their mobile phone for both business and leisure.
One thing that this phone does have over the Apple i-phone is that it allows you to write email messages when holding the phone horizontally which allows you to view longer sentences; this was great when mailing people back in the office detailed instructions.
When you are typing on the phone held vertically the phone uses the Suretype format where 2 letters share a button which takes some getting used to and can cause problems with the use of the touch screen. Also, I am not sure if I just missed something really simple here but when putting in a phone number the field looked for alphabetical values and had to be manually switched to numbers for each digit typed.
The alternative is to add a contact for all of the numbers that you want to call and to then pull them up into the to field – not great if you just want to call a pizza to your hotel room when on a business trip.
At time of writing the applications into Microsoft Office documents only allow you to view and not create documents which often means that if you want to edit a document whilst you are at a meeting you have to make a note and then edit it later on.
You do get access to the Blackberry App world, which will is a downloadable shop that allows you to browse through and download software to your phone – some for free.
The 3.2-megapixel camera is fairly good quality, the pictures came out crisp and clear although they were not incredile at evening shots when we were in a dimly lit room. It comes with a flash and autofocus. It also captures video. This again, is one up on the i-phones camera. It is not bad as a music player and can store a good amount of music, the headphones are OK but volume is not loud enough if you are commuting through busy stations.
Overall the Blackberry Storm Smartphone is a relatively good phone and a fair achievement by Blackberry in their first stab at a real competitor to the i-phone. That said, having used the Blackberry Curve 8520 it just seemed inferior and there is no way that i would choose this over the 8520, especially not for use at work – it may be more appropriate for non business mobile phone users.