Try-phone from RIM a Storm in a teacup

Stan Beer
Monday, 08 December 2008 07:46

IT Industry - Market

In portrait orientation, users are expected to struggle with the stupid unusable SureType keyboard which shares two letters for each key. Honestly, does RIM really expect users to get comfortable with a tiny on-screen keyboard which requires you to press hard and accurately while at the same time hoping the keyboard picks the right word you meant to type?

So your only real choice for composing an email or any other document is using the full QWERTY keyboard. The problem is the QWERTY keyboard is also pretty dismal.

Quite simply, the keys are too small and even more difficult to use because you have to press so hard to get it to register a keystroke. I don't have particulary fat fingers and I have no problem with using the iPhone's keypad but I found that I had to use my fingernail on the Storm to get the keyboard to work accurately for me, but as the BlackBerry's keyboard is like the iPhone's, part of my finger must be on the key as well for it to properly register.

In addition, while the iPhone cleverly pops up a larger version of the key for instant visual confirmation you are pressing the right key, the Storm simply makes the key glow blue. Seeing this glow under your finger is what you are meant to do, but why couldn't the selected key have been made even more obvious?

Web surfing is another area where the Blackberry comes up short compared to the iPhone. Although the screen is indeed multi-touch, it is multi-touch for "copy and paste" only, not where it counts with two-fingered zooming.

If you want to zoom in on an item in the Storm's browseryou have to either double click the screen or use the browser's magnifier icon on the tool bar. Compared to the multi-touch pinching and spreading available on the iPhone's Safari browser, it feels primitive.

And sure, while the BlacBerry lets you use multi-touch to select text for copying and pasting, a feature the iPhone does not have, it's a shame the BlackBerry can't do multi-touch zoom AND use multi-touch for cut, copy and paste - are Apple's patents that tight that no-one else can copy it?

While we're on the subject of web surfing, whose bright idea at RIM was it to leave out Wi-Fi on the Blackberry Storm? For heavens sake, even the iPod Touch has Wi-Fi - hot spots are everywhere. This is supposed to be a Blackberry - a device optimised for sending email messages.

Surfing the web on the Storm was generally slow - it didn't feel like a 3.5G device at all, despite the fact "3G" was being displayed in the title bar. I'm not sure whether this is to do with Vodafone's network, or something inherent in the Storm itself, but a 2G EDGE iPhone was faster and more reliable at getting web pages to load than the Storm!

A software update has also emerged, going from 4.7.0.65 in the box, to 4.7.0.78 in the newest software update, and while this reportedly fixes a stack of bugs, it didn't seem to make any difference to my Storm experience, which still leaves me feeling cold and wet.

There is one thing that I prefer in the Storm compared to the iPhone - it has a removeable battery.

However, that simply isn't enough to compensate for all the negatives in this would-be iPhone copy - next!