Blackberry Storm shows winning form

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 24 November 2008 16:40

Opinion and Analysis

The launch of the BlackBerry Storm showed that it wasn’t only Apple iPhones that could generate queues in the US, even though the US is the centre of the financial storm that is draining consumer spending power. Reviews say the Storm is pretty good, and with firmware updates, will get even better!

If you’re a BlackBerry user, hooked on the CrackBerry experience, then the iPhone is unlikely to have tempted you away from the black to the crunchy side of the force.

Although the iPhone’s email experience improved with the release of iPhone OS 2.x firmware, it still pales next to the BlackBerry, which has a far more customisable email client and also comes with security ratings that satisfy rigorous military standards few other smartphones can claim.

Now the Storm has finally arrived to rain on the iPhone’s parade, and with its digital meida friendly 3.25-inch screen and upcoming BlackBerry “App Store”, competes more strongly against not only the iPhone, but every other major smartphone on the market.

There are plenty of reviews out there, but the one I like the best is from the Boy Genius Report, although it does seem like with all new phones these days it needs at least one new firmware revision (if not a few as per Apple, Nokia and others) to iron out some of the initial minor bugs, fix whatever "major" bugs are discovered and add new features.

That said, the BlackBerry Storm is but a version one, and hasn’t even been out for a week yet. No doubt updated firmware is being worked on, including for things like finger scrolling that works the way the iPhone does.

You see, the iPhone lets you flick up or down, and scrolling keeps on going for a while before stopping. It’s a way cool effect and screams out iPhone all by itself.

The Storm doesn’t do that – when you take your finger off the screen it stops scrolling immediately. Boooooring.

There’s also things like the multi-touch capability. At the moment all it can be used for is selecting text for cutting and pasting.

Now, don’t get me wrong – multi-touch for cut and paste is a nice big slap in Apple’s touchscreen, and serious one ups the reality field distortioner, but if Apple has some magical patent that means no-one else can pinch and zoom images or websites on screen, then that truly sucks.

Where else is multitouch available today, and what else am I going to tell you about the Storm? It’s all on page 2...