Try-phone from RIM a Storm in a teacup

Stan Beer
Monday, 08 December 2008 07:46

IT Industry - Market

The first thing you notice with the Storm is its similar size and form factor to the iPhone, although it's slightly shorter and wider. It doesn't have that simple one button return to the main menu but that's no real problem; it's easy enough to navigate to the main menu page.

The real disappointment with the Blackberry Storm comes when you fire it up. In true "let's copy the iPhone" tradition, the latest phone from RIM upon powering up presents users with a simple iPhone-esque touch screen menu system. That's fine except RIM obviously has no idea how to implement a usable touch screen.

Compared to the iPhone screen which is a joy to tap, slide your finger across, pinch or spread, the Storm screen feels clunky, chunky and crude.

Whether you happen to be typing an email (we'll get to the keypad shortly) or selecting an application from the menu, you really have to push unacceptably hard on the screen to register your selection. Scrolling using the finger flick is also quite jerky and only allows you to scroll a set amount with each flick, lacking the smooth gliding intuitive responsiveness of the iPhone which simulates a frictionless physical scrolling device.

Not having the screen continue to slowly scroll on once you remove your finger turns out to be quite annoying on the BlackBerry, for it makes scrolling take much longer than it should.

However, using the onscreen QWERTY keyboard for doing what the Blackberry is famous for - composing emails - is where the Storm really fails miserably. The Storm keyboard is - to put it bluntly - unusable.

Like the iPhone, the Blackberry Storm has an accelerometer. This means that you can swich between portrait or landscape implementations of the keyboard by physically rotating the handset.

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