Brian @ Wongside

I went to the Verizon Wireless store during my lunch break to check out the launch of the Blackberry Storm. They had sold out that morning, which isn’t surprising based on that Reuters article.  But they did have two demo models. I only got to play with it for about 10 minutes before a line formed behind me.  Some of my impressions shouldn’t come as a surprise based on the published specs, but they do reflect how I feel about the presence, or lack of certain features.  Keep in mind that I’ve spent a fair amount of time playing with Charlene’s iPhone, and I’ve never owned or spent any significant amount of time with a Blackberry, so that’s the perspective I’m coming from.  In any case, here are my initial impressions with letter grades:

• Physically, it’s beautiful.  The screen is nice and bright, though I didn’t get to take it outside under the Sun. (A)
• The screen grabs fingerprints like no other, so a screen protector is recommended. Then again, what glass screened device doesn’t (including the iPhone?) (C)
• It lacks the iPhone’s multi-touch, which is disappointing.  While web browsing, it was easy to zoom in by clicking the screen, but it wasn’t intuitive on how to zoom out.  I was ultimately able to zoom out by hitting the return arrow hard key, not clicking the screen. (C)
• The click screen is great! It brings the whole mouse hover/click paradigm to the phone.  By resting my finger on the screen, I could hover before finalizing my selection by clicking.  It’s a much better experience than the iPhone. PC World’s assessment that “Ultimately, the Storm’s touch interface feels like a failed experiment.” is bogus.  It just needs a little more polish.  I’d give it a B-/B.
• I don’t like the SureType technology when the phone is in portrait mode.  It made it really hard to go to my favorite tech news site: Arstechnica.com.  I think it was trying to send me to “seatechnical.com” or something.  And it wasn’t easy to correct. Also, in this mode, the space bar is tiny, the same size as all the other keys, which seemed non-intuitive. (D)
• The typing in landscape was good, but as other reviewers have mentioned, they keyboard is so big it leaves little to see where you’re typing on screen. (B)
• Browsing was fast enough, but I couldn’t really comment whether it was faster than the iPhone or not. (B)
• The browsing experience wasn’t as good as on the iPhone.  Scrolling isn’t nearly as smooth.  I mentioned the zoom and multi-touch issue above.  It was hard to enter information into forms, or to even get the phone to recognize that I was trying to click on a form to enter information.  Once the form field was selected, sometimes there was a delay in the UI before the keyboard showed up.  It was noticeable enough to make me wonder if it froze. (C)
• I didn’t get to use the camera or the obvious feature that makes the Blackberry a Crackberry: e-mail, but I’m sure it’s fair to say that the experience will be consistent with other Blackberries. (A)

I think in sum, it’s a good product.  It’s a great competitor to the iPhone, but does lack somewhat in UX (user experience) and polish. On the other hand, this is a first generation product, and the iPhone is already on v2.  So Apple has a bit of a head start.  I’m hopeful that the Storm will give Apple a run for its money and create a win for all consumers.

Alrighty, that’s all for now.