Brian @ Wongside

It’s been over a month since I got a Blackberry Tour. Four weeks after I got it, I took it back thinking I’d like to try out the iPhone clone: the Blackberry Storm.

In short: I was sorely disappointed.

I think my biggest complaint was that the Storm was really laggy and froze on me about half a dozen times in the three weeks I had it. My biggest praise was that it was a touch screen. Other than that, here’s some additional thoughts:

Pros:

• It is a touch screen in the truest sense of the word. You need to physically interact with the screen itself. (See cons for the downside.)
• Despite having the same resolution, the screen is physically bigger (3.25″ vs.  2.44″) than the Tour’s, which makes it a joy to use things like Google Maps.
• The QWERTY keyboard found in landscape mode is nice, big, and wide.
• The icons are big, so they’re easy to hit, even with big hands like mine.

Ambivalent:

• Battery life was better than the Tour, but still not anywhere near the 15 days of standby it advertises.

Cons:

• It’s more of a “press screen” than a touch screen. Having used Charlene’s iPhone on occasion, I’m totally used to what I would consider an excellent touch screen experience. Having to actually press the screen down is really a nuisance.
• It froze repeatedly. One time it gave me a red, green, blue, black, and white static-y looking screen. When that popped up, it refused to do anything. I had to pull the battery and restart the phone in order to get it to work again.
• I don’t know that you could really call it this, but it takes forever to “reboot.” I see it as a phone, which is really meant to be turned on.  Conversely, I guess it’s technically a mini computer, which does “reboot.” In any case, it took upwards of 2 minutes for it to go from fully off to ready to accept input. How absurd!
• The sensor it uses to determine orientation is really flawed. Half the time I wanted it in portrait, it rotated landscape. Half the time I wanted it in landscape, it turned portrait on me. This was quite frustrating, and often left me shaking it in an attempt to get it to the orientation I wanted.
• Every time I got a voicemail, I got a text message letting me know I had a new message. This was common to both the Tour and the Storm, and it was really annoying. I don’t know if this was a Verizon thing, or a Blackberry thing, but it had me quite irked. What this essentially meant was that any time I missed a call and got a voicemail, I had three notifications on my phone: a text message, a missed call, and a voicemail. In order to get rid of all three, I had to check my text messages, my call log, and call my voicemail. Again, this happened on both my Tour and the Storm, but I’ve never had it happen on any other phone I’ve owned.
• The SureType keyboard in portrait mode was horrible, especially for typing passwords. It always thought it new what my password was, and mixed up the letters, the case, or both.
• Typing was miserably slow. Because you have to physically press down the screen, you also have to wait for it to pop back up before pressing the next key. I don’t have any empirical measures, but I’d guess I was at least 25-33% slower on the Storm than on the Tour.
• No good sleep/lock mode like the iPhone. Hit the screen at any point, and it asks if you want to unlock, make an emergency call or cancel. I was always scared I’d pocket dial 911. There were a few times where I was faced with the screen that asked me if I really wanted to make an emergency call, so I think I was only one screen press away. Aye yah!
• I have no idea if this is a Blackberry limitation, or a Verizon Wireless one, but whenever I was on a call, the data mode wouldn’t work. In other words, I couldn’t be on the phone and surfing the web at the same time. It even knew that this capability wasn’t available because it actually told me I It wouldn’t load my e-mail or the maps either. That made it hard to multi-task on the sucker.

Again, the kicker for me was the constant freezing.  I had the phone less than three weeks, 6 times in 21 days is once every 3 or 4 days. And the lagginess of it was unbearable.

I guess I can always hope that Verizon get’s a host of new smart phones in the near future. If they got the Pre, that would be a pretty good deal, and hopefully RIM gets their act together and makes a Storm 2 worthy of being version 2.0.

In the mean time, I’ve got a dead KRZR, so I’m without a “modern” phone.  Until then, I’m back to my dad’s old, trusty LG VX3200, which is close to 5 years old by now.  It’s quite functional, and still has a pretty decent battery life.  That’s more than I can say for the Blackberry Storm.