BlackBerry Storm

"BlackBerry Shit-Storm" more like it.

When this this was announced in the summer it looked like it was going to be über-cool and I couldn't wait to get my hands on it.

But wait I did. For months. I signed up for news on the release date and waited. "Out in time for Christmas" I was promised.

I finally received notice that it was being released in mid-December and went down to my local Bell store at the first opportunity to have a look at one. They didn't have any. Sure, technically, it was "released" - they released a grand-total of one-hundred devices in British Columbia, fifty to Telus and fifty to Bell. Naturally they all went to insiders and no store in the province actually saw a device. "Try back in January, we'll have some for real then."

So, I go back in mid-January. Nothing yet. A week later I get a notice from the news I signed up for saying offering me a $50 credit if I got one before January 31. So I went back into the store, coupon in hand, and go told "try again next week."

The next week, on the 31st, I went back and got one. For real this time. And today, February 1st, I took it back for a refund.

As hyped, the touch-screen is nice and big, and the clicky tactile feedback worked and felt quite like pressing real buttons. What put me off fast was the "keyboard."

When held in landscape mode you get a full QWERTY keyboard, and it is bigger than what you get on a Curve or a Bold - this was a plus I was looking forward to, since I have large hands. However, trying to type with any speed was impossible. On a regular BlackBerry QWERTY keyboard I can type reasonably fast using both of my thumbs. The Storm keyboard, being essentially one big button, means lifting one thumb completely from the keyboard before pressing the next virtual key. So much as resting on the surface, even if it's not with enough pressure to highlight they virtual key beneath (the keys "light up" as you touch the screen so you can see exactly which virtual key you are about to press) causes the screen to not register the click from the other thumb. Effectively you are reduced to typing with one digit, halving the speed with which you can type.

If that's not bad enough, the QWERTY keyboard is simply not available in all applications, most notably doing address lookups in the phone application. Only one of my third-party applications allowed the QWERTY keyboard to be used in landscape mode. The phone application and the other third-party applications leave you stuck with the Pearl-like "Quick Type" keyboard (and why is it that marketing weasels, ever since the naming of Greenland, love so much to give crappy things cutesy names that are the complete and total opposite to how one would describe the thing in real life? Is anybody every fooled by this?) And while the great big screen afforded by not having a real keyboard looks good when reading e-mail, being able to respond is half the point of having a BlackBerry. In both landscape and portrait mode the virtual keyboard takes up so much screen real-estate that what you are left with is reminiscent of the first-generation BlackBerry pagers. Basically, you are stuck with a twice the size, twice as hard to type on BlackBerry Perl with half the useful screen area for twice the money. No thanks. 

Being a photographer, I might have been swayed if the camera was half-decent. But that sucks, too. Sure it's 3.2 megapixels, but 3.2 megapixels of the exact same crappy, fuzzy, grainy, visual garbage that I get from my old Curve. I have fifteen-year-old sub-megapixel cameras that take clearer, more usable pictures. Another fail.

The web browser impressed me for about a minute, after loading a nice little rendering of a CSS and AJAX heavy page that I didn't expect to work at all. Then I tried to navigate and found the thing zooming when I didn't want it to, not zooming when I *did* want it to, not registering clicks, and... not bringing up the QWERTY keyboard when I wanted to fill in a field!

Get an Apple iPhone, get a BlackBerry Bold, stick with your BlackBerry Curve, pretty much do anything but get a BlackBerry (Shit)Storm.

Oringinal post: http://mbarrick.livejournal.com/871702.html