BlackBerry Storm Review

Introduction:

What’s this, the new BlackBerry? Woah, it has no keyboard. And…did it just click? You’ve never clicked a screen before, is that supposed to happen? Is it supposed to feel so…tiring? And why is this screen wiggling around, am I supposed to be seeing the circuit board? Why is it so heavy; the iPhone isn’t this heavy? The interface is pretty neat, but why are page transitions taking so long. Did it just flip orientations on me? I didn’t even move it. Wait, now I did move it and the orientation isn’t following. What’s going on, I thought this was supposed to be an iPhone killer? This is what Verizon is putting their muscle behind? Really?

And so goes our first ten minutes with the BlackBerry Storm. RIM, the company that said touchscreens were a fad, has thrown their hat in game with their latest and “greatest” device. The only problem is that this device will alienate their customer base. We have no doubt it will sell, after all how many posers are carrying BlackBerries now just to say they have one, unaware of what BlackBerry Internet Service or Desktop Manger even is. Too many, and the Storm will only exaggerate that. But the true BlackBerry user, the enterprise customer who would just as soon trade in their wife then their beloved Curve, they won’t last five minutes with this. It’s unstable. Typing is atrocious and unbelievably inaccurate (seriously, there were times when we couldn’t even decipher what we had just typed.)

Ok, it's not all bad and for those users that don't actually use a BlackBerry for its BlackBerry functions it's a pretty good device. The browser is pretty awesome. The new interface has eyecandy galore, although there’s really nothing fundamentally new. “Verizon” isn’t plastered all over the device. Videos look fantastic on the 3.2” crystal clear display, and with 1GB of internal storage and an included 8GB microSD card there is plenty room to store them. It has an autofocusing 3.2 megapixel camera with flash that can record QVGA videos. It’s a quad-band GSM device, and VZW will eventually provide you with the subsidy unlock code, meaning that you can conceivably use it on T-Mobile or AT&T here in the States, though you won’t have 3G data. But it’s just…off.

Design:

The first thing you notice is how heavy the Storm is. It’s nearly an ounce heavier than the iPhone and Bold, and a full ounce and a half heavier than the Diamond and Curve. We appreciate heft for the sake of quality, and in fact have taken some criticism for knocking devices that are too light, but the Storm is just plain heavy. It’s also wide; its 2mm narrower than the iPhone, but 6, 9 and 12mm wider than the Curve, Dare and Diamond, respectively. The 3.2” display makes it tall, but it’s a full 7mm taller than the Instinct which also has a 3.2” screen.




You can compare the BlackBerry Storm with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

For the most part the design is very solid. Its very iPhoney in appearance, with the large touchscreen and chrome trim, but you’ll never be mistaking the two. Four familiar hardkeys- Send, Menu, Escape, End- sit at the bottom of the unit, though this time without a trackball to separate them. On the left side is a convenience key and microUSB charging/data port (a first for RIM); on the right is a 3.5mm headset jack, volume rocker and another convenience key. All of the side keys are chrome, and the black side housing has a rubbery finish.


The 3.2MP camera and flash are in a glossy housing on the top of the rear of the Storm. The prominent battery door is brushed metal which feels wonderful. At the top of the door is an embedded chrome BlackBerry logo, and at the bottom is a small, screen printed Verizon one. Shockingly, this is the only Verizon branding you’ll find on the Storm, a very welcome change from pretty much every device they’ve put out in the past 8 years. The very bottom of the back is the same rubbery finish as the side housing, and in fact integrates with it.


The single speaker sits on the back where the door meets the rubber housing. RIM has incorporated a subtle but great design touch, and flanking the speaker are two rubber feet which raise the device off of a surface ever so much. One of the biggest problems with rear facing speakers is that they are muffled when set down, and this slight spacing cleverly addresses that issue. Kudos to the engineer who thought that one through!

In portrait mode the Storm feels unnatural in the hand, much like the iPhone only heavier. It’s much better in landscape mode, and we’d imagine most people will be utilizing this orientation more often than not. The weight is better when holding it with two hands rather than one, but that’s not to say it’s good.


The screen, oh man the screen. It’s pretty darn gorgeous, but we can’t get over how it moves. It was literally the first thing we noticed when we picked the device up, and our exact reaction is “why the hell does this thing wiggle?” It’s very disconcerting, and makes the Storm feel incredibly cheap. There is play in all four sideways directions, and a lot of it. We’re not talking a little wiggle, we’re talking gaps big enough that you can clearly see the circuit board below. We realize it’s probably necessary and alleviates stress when clicking the screen, but man does it cheapen the device. But it is pretty. Videos looked amazing; crisp and bright and vivid.

And then there’s the whole clicking issue. In theory it’s a good idea, because who hasn’t inadvertently brushed a touchscreen and selected something they didn’t want. By highlighting with a tap, then selecting with a press theoretically the user gets exactly what they want. For those reluctant to give up their keyboard it also provides tactile feedback. The key terms here is “in theory,” because in practice it’s annoying.

First off, if it worked perfectly it might be a different story, but it doesn’t. Lag is present throughout the device (more on that later) but most frustrating with the selection process. There are times when we found ourselves clicking on an item, but the Storm only registered the highlight. It wasn’t common, but common enough to be a legitimate gripe. It is also inconsistent. In the commercial we see the mysterious hand swiping across the home icons, and the highlight following his finger. This doesn’t happen in real life, at least not on the homescreen or main menu. In the Media application, however, you can do just that with the icons at the bottom. Again, minor gripe but it’s just an illustration of the ill-executed nature of the Storm.

Most importantly is typing, especially since we’re talking about a BlackBerry. To say the Storm misses the mark is an understatement. This may sound like hyperbole, but we cannot think of a keyboard worse than the Storm. Ever. Touchscreen or not. Unless you’re typing along at hunt-and-peck speeds it simply cannot keep up with you and is horribly inaccurate. We compared onscreen keyboards from the Diamond, iPhone, Instinct and Dare and put them up against the Storm. On the first three devices we were able to quickly tap out messages with minimal mistakes, and autocorrect usually fixed our errors. The Dare had some trouble keeping up, as we noted in our touchscreen comparison review, but in general it got most of it. Messages on the Strom were often unreadable. As we slowed down we got more accurate, and tweaking some of the sensitivity settings helped a bit, but at full speed it just plain couldn’t perform.

We have a feeling there are two things that may be causing this. First and foremost is that the software just isn’t that good. The other factor, one that we could control, is that the screen can’t handle multiple presses (multi-touch.) We found that there were times our one hand was still slightly touching the screen, so that when we clicked with the other it registered the wrong finger. In this respect there is a learning curve, but we don’t get the feeling that we’d have it mastered in any amount of time. After all, with the exception of the iPhone none of the other phones have multi-touch and we did not run into the same issue. Keyboards have always set BlackBerry devices apart from the rest of the crowd, and the Storm is no different, except that this time it’s setting the standard on the other end of the spectrum.

Lastly, typing is tiring. After just a few messages our thumbs began to feel fatigued, and we were not alone in thinking that. We had several people try the device, and without mentioning it they all said the same thing. Keep in mind this was just after a few quick text and PIN messages, typing out a full email was downright exhausting on our thumbs. We often found ourselves wondering how RIM could have ever passed this device through beta testing, not to mention release it and market it as the iPhone killer.

Interface:

The new 4.7 OS is gorgeous to look at, and keeps the same design philosophy as the Bold’s 4.6 OS.  It is basically the same OS found on past devices such as the Curve and Pearl, only with redesigned icons and different input method.  Each application has its own icon, and the users can still arrange, organize and categorize them as they wish.  The menu can be navigated in both portrait and landscape mode.  When in landscape the user always has the full menu, in portrait there is a standby screen with two rows of four semi-transparent icons at the bottom.  There is only one theme preloaded.


In past reviews we’ve lamented the lack of a touchscreen and were never totally sold on the trackball, but unfortunately we got what we asked for.  When holding the device horizontally we especially felt that a trackball would be perfectly placed and useful.  We still feel strongly that RIM devices should utilize a touchscreen, just not at the expense of a physical keyboard and definitely not a clickable one.

As always, simple things are more complicated then they need to be, where complex things are as simple as can be.  Setting up an email, for example, is a wonderful and painless experience.  Changing the volume, not so much.  While the number after the 4. keeps getting higher, the core OS remains basically unchanged which isn’t a good thing.

The performance has noticeably improved after the .75 update, especially in regards to accelerometer performance.  The lag has been reduced greatly as well, though is still present to a small extent.  Had it been like this at launch we most likely wouldn’t have minded, as the speed is on par with previous BlackBerry offerings 90% of the time.  The accelerometer for some reason still lags somewhat when switching to landscape, but in general it now works as expected.  It has not locked orientation on us since the upgrade.  The device on the whole continues to lock now and again; at times it will recover after 10-30s but if not a battery pull is required.  Why RIM didn’t address this before launch we have no idea, but at least they released an update fairly quickly that resolved many of the issues.

Phonebook:

There isn’t anything new about the phonebook, which is a good thing.  It’s as simple and straightforward as ever, and you can store virtually an unlimited amount of contacts.  Each contact can hold three email addresses, two work phone numbers, two home numbers, a mobile, pager, fax and “other” number as well as a space for a BlackBerry PIN number. There is a slot for both a home and work address, as well as dates for anniversary and birthdays. Contacts can be sorted by user definable categories, each entry can have a custom ringer and picture ID, and there is a section for a webpage and notes.


Homescreen contact search has been cut on the Strom.  The keyboard is accessible when in the full menu, but it will not search the contacts by either name or number.  Instead, when you click on any letter it will take you to the phone application.


Voice dialing is handled by Nuance (formally VoiceSignal) and is excellent.  The left softkey is still preprogrammed to activate it, and it is still slightly annoying but the higher button placement leads to much less unintended presses.

Organizer:

Again, nothing is really new here.  Like the phonebook, the calendar function is very robust. It can be managed either on your phone or on your PC, and when paired to a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) it can be remotely managed and synced over the air. Creating an appointment is simple, and options such as reminders and recurrence are present. Appointments can also be marked as private for added security.

Other basic PIM functions are available, such as Tasks and a Memo Pad. Tasks is very basic, but reminders can be set and they can also be grouped into categories. The Memo Pad is a basic notepad, no bells and whistles. A Voice Note Recorder is present for taking notes on the go, and a basic calculator is also available.

Messaging:

The messaging options and interface is pretty much the same as before.  AIM is preloaded, previously only available on Sprint, and you also find Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and Windows Live Messenger.  Of course, BlackBerry PIN messaging is also along for the ride, as are SMS and MMS standards.  Email is as great as ever, we aren’t connect to a BES but with BIS our emails were delivered instantly and setup is a breeze.

We like the interface enough, and the myriad of messaging options are great, but as mentioned before typing is less than desirable even after the .75 update.  To stay accurate we have to type at half the speed that we can on other devices like the Curve, Xperia X1 and Instinct.  Using the SureType keyboard was better than the QWERTY, but we never liked SureType in the first place.  We mentioned in our review that we weren’t totally sold on iPhone’s keypad, but even still we can type much faster than we can with the Storm.  The Instinct and iPhone are infinitely better because of their autocorrect, but the Storm fails on this front as well.  We’ve had no trouble with it on past RIM units, so we assume that our typing is just that inaccurate and the software just can’t figure out what’s going on.  We don’t blame it, after reading a quickly typed message we couldn’t always figure out what we were trying to say either.  The software update didn’t have any effect on this shortcoming, and we are inclined to think that the root of the problem lies in the hardware.  The bread and butter of past RIM devices has become the Storm’s Achilles Heel.



Connectivity and Data:

The Storm is a global device with dual-band CDMA and quad-band GSM.  It has the ability to connect to high speed data networks across the globe as well; on the GSM side it has 3G on the 2100MHz band for Europe and Asia, and here at home EVDO Rev. A for Verizon.  Locally you’ll find Bluetooth 2.0 with support for the HSP, HFP 1.5, DUN, PBA, A2DP, AVRC profiles.  Unfortunately there is no Wi-Fi, though with Verizon’s expansive 3G network and the Storm’s required data plan most users won’t miss it too much.

The browsing experience is the best on a BlackBerry yet, hands down.  Pages render well, but not perfectly.  For example, on our homepage the news text overwrote the pictures.  At times pages loaded quickly, but other times they took longer than we would have expected over Rev. A speeds. PhoneArena has taken anywhere from 40s to over a two minutes to load in our testing.  YouTube videos play via m.youtube.com, but video quality was quite poor.



The browser does not reformat text to fit the display, an annoyance for sure.  Zooming is achieved by double taping the screen (no clicks) and the Escape key zooms back out.  Each double tap will zoom in a bit further, but Escape takes you all the way out.  The screen play renders its ugly head again while browsing; when panning around a page the screen moves with your fingers and butts up against the sides.  Overall the browsing experience is great though, it took a major drawback of the RIM OS and turned it into an overwhelming strength.

BlackBerry Desktop Manager handles desktop sync as always.  It is used to manage calendar, tasks, contacts and email synchronization with your desktop.  You can also use the data cable to load media onto the memory card, and Media Sync will allow for iTunes syncing of non-DRM files, like we’ve seen with other recent BlackBerries.

Multimedia:

This is an area where the Storm really excels. We liked the Media Player found on past devices such as the Pearl, but the Storm’s large, high-resolution screen makes it that much better. The music player is pretty much an iPhone clone, and even though it isn’t original it is still great. The video player is very similar as well, though we had serious issues bringing up playback controls. Like the iPhone, a simple tap of the screen brings up playback controls in the music and video player.  The .75 update has fixed issues we were having with this in regards to the video player. That’s really the only complaint we have though. Videos look fantastic despite only 65k colors and the music player read all the ID3 tags and album art perfectly. Music plays in the background allowing the user to do anything from email to messaging and web surfing.


The camera performance was less than stellar however.  Images were dark, even those taken in our light box, and there was a lot of noise.   On top of that color representation was poor; our candy apple red fire hydrant turned out orange, for example.  The shutter lag was horrific, upwards of five seconds after the autofocus was set, which took 3-4 seconds itself.  Combine that with a startup time of around two seconds and the user is looking at at least ten seconds before a picture can be snapped, which makes it unusable for the spontaneous shots so many people use their cell cameras for.  Another gripe is that there is a bar at the bottom of the screen when taking pictures, which obscures part of the viewfinder.  As you can see from our one picture this leads to fingers getting in the frame accidentally.  The QVGA videos were appropriate for YouTube, but similar to the camera the overall performance was lackluster. One cool feature is that the Storm geotags pictures.




Software:

The Storm runs on 128MB of RAM and 192MB ROM, with 1GB of internal storage and an included 8GB microSD card that is expandable up to 16GB.  With the latest software the Storm generally runs smoothly, and when it does hit a hiccup we don’t think the memory is to blame.

GPS has been unlocked for BlackBerry Maps, but not Google Maps. Windows Live Search downloaded, but would not run. VZ Navigator is still the worst carrier branded GPS solution, but it gets the job done. We’ll use it because it’s our only option, but AT&T and Sprint Navigation, nee Telenav, is a much better product.

Other included applications include Flickr and Facebook, as well as Documents to Go for Word, Excel and PowerPoint viewing. The user is given a 30 day trial of the premium service which allows editing as well, but after that must purchase the product. Nuance provides their fantastic voice dialing software.

Performance:

Voice quality was very good on the Storm, as was battery life. On our end callers were clear and voices sounded natural. Callers said we were a touch hollow, but that overall we sounded very good and gave us an 8.5/10 rating. The in-call screen is new, with large icons for Speaker, Mute, Flash and Add Participant. Along the bottom the user can access the Keyboard, Notes, Home Screen, Calendar and their Contact list. Our only complaint is that when the phone was resting against our face we often activated the mute button, which is obviously problematic.

The battery is rated at 6 hours of talk time, but we were able to slightly exceed that with 6h and 11m. Standby is rated at a more than ample 15 days. This is as good as it gets folks; as a phone the Storm performs wonderfully.

Conclusion:

The Storm sets very lofty goals, but misses the mark on many of them and in the process loses its way.  At its core a BlackBerry should be a top notch messaging device, which has always allowed us to look past other shortcomings.  Not so with the Storm, as the flaws greatly outweigh the benefits.  The phone performance is top notch and the Storm is a great media device, but beyond that there isn't much to like.  RIM has already addressed software issues and we applaud their swiftness, but we feel that the hardware is a limiting factor with the Storm.  The size and weight are awkward, and we can't believe we're saying this but we miss the trackball.  The screen play is disconcerting, and we just aren't buying the clickable screen.  But most importantly typing is a workout and even worse inaccurate, and without that a BlackBerry just isn't a BlackBerry.

For those not concerned with messaging and looking for a converged media player and phone with above average web performance we'd give the Storm an 8/10 rating, but be aware that you're dropping an extra $30/month for that convenience.  If you're looking for the messaging prowess you've come to know and love from your Curve then the Storm isn't worth your time.

The review is based on a phone running software with version 4.7.0.75

June 2009: A software update to version 4.7.0.148 has been released. It fixes a lot of the issues mentioned in this review. You can check our hands-on with the new update here.