It's hard to overstate how important the BlackBerry Storm is to RIM and Verizon. It's RIM's bold effort to fend off the iPhone and Verizon's best hope for a star handset that draws people in, or at least keeps them from bailing. The BlackBerry Storm's major innovation is what RIM calls SurePress—the entire touchscreen is fat, honkin' button—which has been paired with a redesigned, finger-friendly BlackBerry OS. We've already showed you a lot of what the fuss is all about, but now that we've spent some quality, uninterrupted time with the Storm, here's why we think it falls short of its promise.
The Body
The body BlackBerry Storm is surprisingly heavy. Like, heavier than RIM's manly slab of smartphone, the Bold, at 5.47 oz to the Bold's 4.7 oz. It feels thick, too, thicker than it actually is, because of its squarish shape. It looks good, it feels okay in your hand. It's just kind of clunky at the same time. On the other hand though, all this substance also makes the Storm feel really robust. You'll never feel like you're going to break it.
That Button Screen
When you push the screen and it clicks, it's a genuinely satisfying tactile sensation that, as I said in my hands on, is clearly a finely tuned experience. You won't accidentally press it when you don't mean to, but you don't have to drop a sledgehammer on it, either. Like the rest of the body, it's a sturdy piece of hardware that seems like it will hold up over the many, many thousands of clicks it will endure in its life time. The only concern is that it seems like the chasm between the screen and rest of the body is a lint nest waiting to happen. But the gap is large enough you should be able to clean your pocket gunk out with the edge of a toothpick.
Screen
The Storm has the biggest, highest resolution screen RIM has ever produced with a 480x360 res. It's bright and beautiful, though not quite as stunning as the Bold's since it has a lower pixel density. Still, the OS and video look fantastic on it, with plenty of pop. The capacitive touchscreen is fairly responsive—on par with the T-Mobile G1—though sometimes the OS lags behind you.
Battery
We haven't fully tested the battery life on the Storm yet, but it seems to be respectable. The battery isn't quite as beefy as the beast powering the Bold, but you shouldn't have a huge problem getting through the day on one charge or anything.
Network
No Wi-Fi is a bummer, even with Verizon's fantastic 3G network, 'cause not even it penetrates everywhere. That said, one of the Storm's greatest strengths is Verizon's network, with its basically unbeatable coverage, and you'll get a signal most everywhere that's not a subway, airplane or supervillian secret lair. 3G is plenty fast and more reliable than AT&T, so it's been sunshine. Any pokiness in web browsing is the software's fault. Calls sounded great to the other party, though they sounded kind of muted to me on the default volume compared to the Bold.
Camera
The camera is 3.2MP of noisy noise, like most cellphone cameras. The camera is tarted up with some basic photo editing features and a dedicated flash, but it's nothing incredible.
GPS
The GPS seems to provide a pretty accurate location with a reasonable amount of speed, though you're stuck with Verizon's VZ Navigator as the main navigation app (no BlackBerry maps). Some people really hate Verizon's program, so you might be less than stoked here.
Browser
The first thing I asked the RIM rep was how much better the Storm's browser was than the Bold, which kind of eats it when it comes to scripts. He said it was improved "but don't expect a miracle." That's a good assessment. It's fast, faster than the Bold whenever I put them side by side, but not quite the fastest browser on the planet. It's also smarter than the Bold, rendering pages more accurately where the Bold slipped. Performance once pages loaded was good. I'll be doing some more formal benchmarks, like with our browser Battlemodo earlier today, shortly.
One thing RIM gets really right is the browser UI. You have lots of of options for getting around—two prominent zoom in and out buttons, plus you can zoom by clicking. Very easy. You've got two main navigation modes though—pan mode, where your finger swipes zoom around the page, and cursor mode, where the whole screen acts like a trackpad. I mostly stuck with pan mode. SurePress comes in handy when scrolling, because you'll never accidentally press a link again. One thing I'd like is multitouch zooming (sorry, gotta say it) and a way to quickly get to the bottom of the page, since a hard flick doesn't send you flying like on mobile Safari. Overall though, RIM delivers pretty big here.
Multimedia
The biggest improvement over the Bold, media wise, is that the Storm comes with an 8GB microSD card. Unfortunately, everywhere else, it's mostly the same. The media player UI is essentially identical, with minimal tweaks to make it touchable. On the actual playback screen, it's fine, and album art looks great. However, the list system it uses is fairly tired and straight out of the old BlackBerry playbook essentially. The bigger pain point, if you're comparing it to the iPhone's multimedia muscle, is the crappy Roxio Media Manager. New phone, same crap. Please please please get better media software, RIM—this stuff is beneath you. Video looks really great on that screen though!
Source : http://gizmodo.com
The Body
The body BlackBerry Storm is surprisingly heavy. Like, heavier than RIM's manly slab of smartphone, the Bold, at 5.47 oz to the Bold's 4.7 oz. It feels thick, too, thicker than it actually is, because of its squarish shape. It looks good, it feels okay in your hand. It's just kind of clunky at the same time. On the other hand though, all this substance also makes the Storm feel really robust. You'll never feel like you're going to break it.
That Button Screen
When you push the screen and it clicks, it's a genuinely satisfying tactile sensation that, as I said in my hands on, is clearly a finely tuned experience. You won't accidentally press it when you don't mean to, but you don't have to drop a sledgehammer on it, either. Like the rest of the body, it's a sturdy piece of hardware that seems like it will hold up over the many, many thousands of clicks it will endure in its life time. The only concern is that it seems like the chasm between the screen and rest of the body is a lint nest waiting to happen. But the gap is large enough you should be able to clean your pocket gunk out with the edge of a toothpick.
Screen
The Storm has the biggest, highest resolution screen RIM has ever produced with a 480x360 res. It's bright and beautiful, though not quite as stunning as the Bold's since it has a lower pixel density. Still, the OS and video look fantastic on it, with plenty of pop. The capacitive touchscreen is fairly responsive—on par with the T-Mobile G1—though sometimes the OS lags behind you.
Battery
We haven't fully tested the battery life on the Storm yet, but it seems to be respectable. The battery isn't quite as beefy as the beast powering the Bold, but you shouldn't have a huge problem getting through the day on one charge or anything.
Network
No Wi-Fi is a bummer, even with Verizon's fantastic 3G network, 'cause not even it penetrates everywhere. That said, one of the Storm's greatest strengths is Verizon's network, with its basically unbeatable coverage, and you'll get a signal most everywhere that's not a subway, airplane or supervillian secret lair. 3G is plenty fast and more reliable than AT&T, so it's been sunshine. Any pokiness in web browsing is the software's fault. Calls sounded great to the other party, though they sounded kind of muted to me on the default volume compared to the Bold.
Camera
The camera is 3.2MP of noisy noise, like most cellphone cameras. The camera is tarted up with some basic photo editing features and a dedicated flash, but it's nothing incredible.
GPS
The GPS seems to provide a pretty accurate location with a reasonable amount of speed, though you're stuck with Verizon's VZ Navigator as the main navigation app (no BlackBerry maps). Some people really hate Verizon's program, so you might be less than stoked here.
Browser
The first thing I asked the RIM rep was how much better the Storm's browser was than the Bold, which kind of eats it when it comes to scripts. He said it was improved "but don't expect a miracle." That's a good assessment. It's fast, faster than the Bold whenever I put them side by side, but not quite the fastest browser on the planet. It's also smarter than the Bold, rendering pages more accurately where the Bold slipped. Performance once pages loaded was good. I'll be doing some more formal benchmarks, like with our browser Battlemodo earlier today, shortly.
One thing RIM gets really right is the browser UI. You have lots of of options for getting around—two prominent zoom in and out buttons, plus you can zoom by clicking. Very easy. You've got two main navigation modes though—pan mode, where your finger swipes zoom around the page, and cursor mode, where the whole screen acts like a trackpad. I mostly stuck with pan mode. SurePress comes in handy when scrolling, because you'll never accidentally press a link again. One thing I'd like is multitouch zooming (sorry, gotta say it) and a way to quickly get to the bottom of the page, since a hard flick doesn't send you flying like on mobile Safari. Overall though, RIM delivers pretty big here.
Multimedia
The biggest improvement over the Bold, media wise, is that the Storm comes with an 8GB microSD card. Unfortunately, everywhere else, it's mostly the same. The media player UI is essentially identical, with minimal tweaks to make it touchable. On the actual playback screen, it's fine, and album art looks great. However, the list system it uses is fairly tired and straight out of the old BlackBerry playbook essentially. The bigger pain point, if you're comparing it to the iPhone's multimedia muscle, is the crappy Roxio Media Manager. New phone, same crap. Please please please get better media software, RIM—this stuff is beneath you. Video looks really great on that screen though!
Source : http://gizmodo.com
0 comments:
Post a Comment