Today’s cellphones / smartphone have changed the way we communicate with the world, and  I’m constantly asked how do I like the BlackBerry Storm, would I recommend this for others to purchase.  I have had the BlackBerry Storm for several months now, so it is safe to say I’ve tested it enough give this a fair review.

At first glance, it is clear that your eyes are drawn to the front display.  This display is a 3.25 inch (480×360) touchscreen.  Below the screen are the four typical BlackBerry buttons (Phone/Send, Menu, Back/Escape, and End/Power), a micro USB port and convenience key are found on the left, while on the right a second convenience key can be found along with a volume rocker and 3.5mm headphone jack.  Along the top of this phone there is a single LED light to the right, and the lock and mute keys built into the case, almost as if it were to be a soft rocker.

The touchscreen is where most of the phone’s attention will be focused.  Unlike the iPhone, the Storm does not just have a wonderful display but it also utilizes a click technology called SurePress.  The purpose of this is to give the user a physical sensation of clicking when you type or navigate throughout the phone.  When I first began typing on the phone I hated this all together, and still today I find it annoying.   In my opinion, having to physically press down / click the touchscreen is really irritating in two ways.  The first is the fact you are physically limited to how fast you can type on this device.  The user has to click; lift finger and re click the screen. Since the touchscreen is one large button it is not possible to type as fast as a normal QWERTY keyboard.  The second reason the screen is actually floating on a button, and thus screen actually wobbles left/right and up/down, which makes the phone’s screen feel cheap for such an expensive phone.  I wish RIM chose to go  in the direction that Apple did with the iPhone for the screen.

The Storm’s camera is a 3.2 megapixel resolution with a flash built in. The flash is extremely bright; and  many people have commented how the light actually hurts their eyes when taking photos.  Overall the picture is great, although the response time was very slow when taking photos.  To resolve this I had to upgrade my OS to 5.0.328 as this fixed many bugs in the original OS (4.7)  The photo listed below was taken with the BlackBerry Storm (Click to view full resolution).

The storm’s battery is not the greatest; I typically make it about 24 -36 hours before needing charged.  I have my phone attached to my company’s BES so I am constantly receiving emails daily (110 per day on average), text messaging, Gmail (BIS Account) and general phone use.  I do not use the browser much just, every so often but when I do I noticed my battery takes a drain from this.  I keep a second charger with me at work, and a car charger with me in the car just because of the battery life.  In comparison, with my BlackBerry 8830 I can go almost 5 days before a recharge doing the same workload as the Storm.

When it comes to sound quality and reception for phone calls I have had no complaints.  Being on the Verizon network I have not ran in many spots that I did not have coverage.  I’ve had some people tell me at first when I got this phone they had a difficult time hearing me talk, so I found myself speaking louder on the phone almost yelling at times.  An annoyance of the phone is if your face bumps the touchscreen while in call mode, the phone will actually mute the call. After several phone calls I had to learn how to hold the phone just right to stop this from happening.  I believe the iPhone has a proximity feature built into their device, and I would have hoped RIM would have done the same.

It was pretty clear when this phone launched both Verizon and RIM wanted to go after the iPhone’s dominance in the market.  The selling points of the device are great, however I think because of the click screen and other quirks the learning curve and complexity of the Storm may turn off the casual users.  Hopefully with the launch of the Storm2 RIM has fixed most if not all the little issues with this device and can give the Storm a better chance in the market.