IN-DEPTH REVIEW: BlackBerry Storm 9500 -- is it a perfect blend of iPhone and BlackBerry?

What’s this – a BlackBerry without a keyboard? RIM is quite possibly the last company we’d have expected to surrender to the touchscreen craze, but after months of speculation, the BlackBerry Storm – the first RIM smartphone without a physical keypad – has finally been released through Vodafone as the exclusive carrier.

Let’s take a moment to analyse its name. We're all for giving gadgets creative titles; they're easier to remember than a random string of letters and numbers (we're looking at you, Sony). But Storm? We realise that calling it the BlackBerry Awesome or BlackBerry FTW would've been downright tacky, but doesn’t a storm describe inclement weather?

After trialling the BlackBerry Storm for a week, though, we're thinking that its name mightn't be so inappropriate after all. There's a lot to like about RIM's first touchscreen-based smartphone, but serious usability quirks - most notably in the all-important text entry department - make it a hard phone to recommend to seasoned BlackBerry users, or to anyone after a smartphone for processing lots of email.

Design

At first glance, the Storm looks a lot like the original smartphones from O2 and i-mate, only in a more compact form factor. As such, it’s not a particularly distinctive or eye-catching design – not like the ones we’ve seen from Apple and HTC anyway. The front is clad in a gloss black plastic, with a chrome frame that extends along the sides and wraps around the top and bottom, and the back battery cover is constructed from brushed aluminium.

It’s roughly the same width of the iPhone 3G (62.2mm), but it’s thicker and shorter. At 155g, the Storm isn’t light by any stretch of the imagination, but it doesn’t feel overly heavy in your hand (although your back pocket may disagree). A 3.2-inch touchscreen display sits centre-stage, and below it are the call keys and menu and back button.

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Hidden in the bezel above the screen are the screen-lock and mute buttons, and rounding out the sides are the voice command button and microUSB connector on the left, 3.5mm headphone jack, volume rocker buttons and camera launcher on the right, 3.2-megapixel camera on the back and the status indicator light on the top. The microSD slot is behind the battery cover, but thankfully you can pop a card in and out without removing the battery.

Text entry

It’s a universally accepted truth that physical keyboards are better for text entry than virtual on-screen ones – a concept that RIM has tried – and failed – to challenge with the Storm. The 3.2-inch display on the Storm isn’t your everyday touchscreen, it’s actually one large button that you press inwards to type on the keyboard and select menu icons and settings.

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The rationale is obvious: RIM wanted to introduce the same tactile experience that you get from using a keyboard or mouse by making you click the screen in for certain tasks. You can also tap on items without clicking the screen, which has the same effect as hovering a mouse pointer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work very well, and even something as simple as scrolling down a screen can be frustrating.

We’ve always applauded BlackBerrys for having the best keyboards, but the Storm gets the gong for having the worst one we’ve come across. It uses a modified two-letter-to-a-key keyboard when you’re holding it in portrait mode and the full QWERTY keyboard when holding it sideways, but both modes are slow and error-prone. Having to click the screen in when typing each letter may simulate the experience of using a keyboard better than simply tapping on a screen, but in reality it’s far from the real deal, as you can’t actually feel any of the letters when you press them and you have to wait for the screen to pop back up before you can press the next letter.

Screen and navigation

RIM may have failed in the text entry department, but the 3.2-inch screen itself is gorgeous. The display resolution is HVGA, or 480 x 360, and the contrast, brightness and colour saturation all get an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

Unlike all of the post-Pearl BlackBerrys before it, the Storm doesn’t have a trackball for zipping around the menu system – instead, you use your fingers for scrolling through screens and menus. Like the iPhone, it’s a resistive display that only registers input from your fingers, so you don’t have to worry about loose items in your pocket calling random people. It doesn’t offer kinetic scrolling like the iPhone, though, which means you can’t scroll through your contact list or a web page quickly – it stops scrolling as soon as you lift your finger off the display.

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The Storm runs BlackBerry OS 4.7, an upgrade from the version on the Bold that accommodates the touchscreen. But it’s got the same look and feel as the previous OS 4.6, with program shortcuts on the standby screen, stylised icons for the system software, and folders for grouping applications.

Third-party software

One of the most notable additions to OS 4.7 is the Application Center – a centralised interface for finding and downloading BlackBerry applications. If you think that sounds an awful lot like the iPhone’s App Store, you’d be right on the money. The App Store is what the Application Center would like to be, but at the moment it’s a pale imitation. There are only 11 applications available for download, and it’s really just a fancy front-end for finding applications – clicking on any of the available programs launches the BlackBerry’s web browser, and you have to click through multiple screens worth of terms and conditions before you can actually download the program.

Still, RIM has done well with the software selection on the Storm. Like the Bold, it includes Documents To Go Standard Edition for viewing and editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files (creating a file from scratch requires that you upgrade to the Premium Edition), and every flavour of instant messaging client is preinstalled – even ICQ, which we thought had gone the way of Netscape Navigator.

Fanatic Facebook addicts as we are, we were especially keen to give the Facebook client a going over to see how it compared to the equivalent iPhone application. Alas, it seems very much stuck in the Facebook 1.0 stage. You can view friends’ status updates, upload a photo, add new friends, poke someone (who actually does that, anyway?), write on someone’s wall and send them a private message, but that’s it – no commenting on people’s status (or even viewing comments that other people have made to your status), viewing a live feed, or chatting to online friends, as you can on the iPhone Facebook client.

Other cool apps include Vodafone MusicStation (an all-you-can-eat music download service for $11.95 a month), Vodafone Compass (turn-by-turn navigation for use with the Storm’s built-in A-GPS for $8 a month), Windows Live Messenger (ironically better than the client for Windows Mobile) and MySpace Mobile.

Standard software

Then of course, there are the standard system apps, like the BlackBerry Browser and the Messages client, the latter of which aggregates all of your email and text messages into the one inbox. The browser has improved since the one in OS 4.6, and most sites render perfectly – you can switch between full page view and column view using a button at the bottom of the screen. But we found it limiting for extended use – it doesn’t support tabs or Flash content, and loading up large sites takes up a lot of the BlackBerry’s memory and is laggy compared to some of the better mobile browsers.

If you mainly read rather than write or reply to email on your BlackBerry, you’ll find nothing to fault on the Messages program. Setting up an email account is effortless, and each account gets its own icon in the main menu (as well as being aggregated altogether in the main Messages inbox). As with the Bold, rich text and HTML formatting are supported (as are most file attachments), and new to the Storm is the ability to flick through emails by swiping your finger across the screen horizontally.

Multimedia

Multimedia is one of the last things you’d expect a BlackBerry to be good at, but we’d go so far as to say the Storm is better than an iPhone 3G in that respect. Let’s count the ways: the external speaker is considerably more powerful, it can play XviD videos natively (although our test videos were a little jerky in playback, not the buttery-smooth experience we got on the BlackBerry Bold), memory is expandable via microSD card, you’ve got access to both Vodafone Live for buying tracks and Vodafone MusicStation for unlimited music downloads, and the camera is 3.2 megapixels with flash, auto-focus and video recording.

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The user interface for the Media application isn’t as slick as the iPhone’s, but it gets the job done and is easy to use. The main screen has a row of tabs at the bottom for jumping between music, videos, ring tones, pictures and voice notes, and album art takes up most of the screen while you’re playing music. There aren’t any dedicated music playback buttons on the storm, but you can jump back to the Now Playing screen from any other application through the menu button. You can even sync music in your iTunes library thanks to the BlackBerry Media Sync application (provided you’re using a PC).

The 3.2-megapixel camera produces above-average photos, but our subjects complained the flash was too bright for comfort. Plus, the shutter takes a couple of seconds to trigger, so we found many of the people in our shots were either squinting from the flash or closing their eyes due to the slow shutter speed. Videos are recorded at 320 x 240 resolution in the standard 3GPP format, and the quality is quite good for a mobile phone. We recorded a few clips indoors, and even in the poor lighting, the footage was smooth and relatively clear.

Performance

The BlackBerry Storm has a 528MHz Qualcomm processor with 128MB of RAM and 1GB of flash storage. Our review unit ran v4.7.0.65 of the BlackBerry platform, which is an older version than the one that’s currently available for download. We tried updating the first Storm we got to the latest build, but ended up bricking it and having to swap it out to Vodafone for a new unit.

Apparently, the latest version of the Storm’s OS fixes issues with the accelerometer and accuracy of the touchscreen – both things that narked us no end when testing the Storm. We also found system speed to be a little slow, and you already know our position on the performance of the virtual keyboard (see above).

We didn’t have any dramas when it came to phone calls; callers sounded crystal clear on the Storm’s earpiece and the speakerphone is fantastic – loud and clear enough that you don’t need to invest in a separate hands-free kit for using it in the car.

The Storm’s battery is remarkably compact compared to some of the others we’ve seen lately, but it packs a decent 1400mAh. RIM quotes the Storm as having 5.5 hours of talk-time and up to 15 days of standby time; in our tests, we got one and a half to two days of heavy use out of each charge.

Here's a video showing some of the user interface, and particularly, the performance on Vodafone Australia's 3G network. As you can see, it's not exactly "Next G-snappy".

Caveat emptorThe Storm has a few limitations that could very well strike it off your smartphone wish-list. It doesn’t have Wi-Fi, for one, so you’re limited to using the Storm’s HSDPA for your downloads and web browsing. Unlimited email, browsing and online access through the included BlackBerry apps is included in each of the monthly caps available for the Storm, but it doesn’t include video streaming (sorry YouTube, that means you!), and there’s a 3MB limit per file download – any extra, and you’re stung with a 50c per megabyte charge. Or, you can opt for an ‘Internet on your mobile’ data pack for an extra $9.95 on top of your monthly cap, which includes 100MB to use for file downloads and video streaming.

Also, it’s locked to the Vodafone network, so you can forget about swapping it out for another SIM when a cheaper plan comes along. Even if you go overseas, you’re forced to roam onto one of Vodafone’s partner networks.

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Conclusion

One thing that a BlackBerry does better than any other smartphone is email. By making text entry on the Storm so laborious, RIM has really shot itself in the foot and negated its main competitive advantage. Sure, email delivery is still excellent, but that counts for naught when composing and replying to email is such a pain. There are lots of positive points about the Storm, like its excellent multimedia playback, and the ‘promise’ of more software through the Application Store, but RIM needs to play to its main strength – a solid mobile email experience – if it wants to stay competitive with other smartphones, and, unfortunately, the Storm doesn’t quite match that criteria.