TAG | Blackberry’s Storm set to rain on iPhone’s parade |
|
| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Wednesday, 08 October 2008 | |
|
Page 2 of 4 With the 3.25-inch screen, RIM have taken Apple’s concept of “one button” and gone even further, making the entire screen itself a clickable button in a feature called “ClickThrough”. Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
Again, as Gizmodo describes, it means you have to push the screen in when pressing any on-screen graphical button, key or link, but clearly you don’t have to press with enormous force and we’re all used to pressing physical buttons on existing BlackBerries and keypads on phones so it sounds tremendously clever. Gizmodo says that BlackBerry has managed to “separate navigation from confirmation”, which is a very cool way of describing things, and seems quite revolutionary, proving that you never know where the next breakthrough, big or small, will come from. Questions over how quickly you’ll be able to type on a screen you need to “press” each time are obvious, but seeing as I can type very quickly on my phone’s keypad I really don’t see the BlackBerry Storm as ultimately being that much different, although I certainly do look forward to finding out. In addition, the interface supports single touch and gestures alongside multi-touch and the “click” feature, so RIM have clearly tried to make the interface as finger friendly as possible, especially as no stylus is included, or needed. As with the iPhone and the N96, the Storm has an accelerometer as standard, so you can type on a vertical keyboard arranged into the “two letters per key” arrangement of an on-screen SureType key layout, seen on the BlackBerry Pearl as physical keys, while turning the Storm horizontally automically gives you a full qwerty keyboard, with each key individually shown. Other languages that use the AZERTY and QWERTZ keyboards will also be supported. Unfortunately typing on the keys does not cause each one to expand above the key as with the iPhone, it simply makes the key blue, according to Gizmodo, which is a shame – the iPhone’s way of making it obvious which key you’ve pressed is clearly the best way to handle the situation and one which RIM might have to copy in the future. Mike Lazaridis, president and co-chief executive officer at RIM, is the man who claimed he hated typing “on glass”, clearly knowing at the time of BlackBerry’s answer to the “typing on glass with no feedback or only haptic vibration feedback” problem was its own “Clickthrough” solution. To celebrate the media launch of the Storm (with pricing and exact availability yet to be announced), Lazaridis said: “We are proud to introduce the first touch-screen based BlackBerry smartphone together with Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. The BlackBerry Storm is a revolutionary touch-screen smartphone that meets both the communications and multimedia needs of customers and solves the longstanding problem associated with typing on traditional touch-screens. Consumers and business customers alike will appreciate this unique combination of a large and vibrant screen with a truly tactile touch interface.” Vodafone owns 50% of Verizon, which uses CDMA EVDO Rev A wireless broadband technology, while Vodafone’s other operations worldwide primarily use 2100MHz 3.5G HSDPA technology. As Verizon’s EVDO Rev A network in the US provides much better 3G-equivalent coverage than AT&T, RIM is hopefully of creating a massive splash in the US market, while Vodafone in Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand will sell tens of millions, if not tens of millions, more Storm models. That’s the hope, but as each Storm has EVDO and 3.5G connectivity built in, the Storm is another “world phone”, letting business users stay connected in most parts of the planet, not just when at home. And as you’d expect, it also has 2G GSM, GPRS and EDGE support to fall back to when faster 3G speeds aren’t available. What other goodies are swirling around within BlackBerry’s fiercest Storm ever? A whole swag of specs are on page 3. |
| < Next story in category | Previous story in the category > |
|---|
