RIM’s Blackberry Storm

Storm can be considered as the future on which RIM is banking on. The very first time you touch the Storm’s screen you will find that it is one big button which you have to press basically for every action making it a little uncanny if you are used to the universal touchscreen rules.

Design

The Storm is a beautiful and a well crafted device. The front panel display is a 3.25 inch (8.3 cm) TFT-LCD flat touch-sensitive scratch-resistant screen with 360 X 480 pixel resolution and able to display 65,536 colours. Below the screen there are four BlackBerry keys for phone, menu, back, and end / power and on the left there is a convenience key & a micro USB port. Right side has another convenience key, a volume rocker, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. On the back, the battery cover is a solid piece of brushed aluminium with a camera and flash sitting on top of the plate covered by a glossy plastic strip. Along the top of the phone there’s a single LED to the right, a lock and mute keys found in either side of the casing.

SurePress

In Storm you have to push the touchscreen like a button every time you do something. Typing with it needs getting used to as you actually have to lift your thumb back off of the screen to register every single letter. Additionally the character hovering is marked by a blue glow.
For copy and paste options you just have to grab the beginning and end of a section of text you want to select with two fingers and a menu pops up along the bottom. Also you can double tap to zoom into pages. Though to back out you need to hit minus magnifying glass.

Browsing

The browser is highly competent at rendering HTML. There are couple of different ways to navigate around a page, though the most unique one is when the whole screen can be used as a trackpad so that once you have the cursor pop up, a finger can be used anywhere on the screen to move it around. Overall, the browsing experience is good though as per Verizon standards it will be done over EV-DO and not Wi-Fi, since it doesn’t have the latter.

Icons along the bottom of the display allow quick access of Web sites, switching between “Page View” and “Column View” as well as the ability to toggle between “Pan” mode and “Cursor” mode. The enhanced browser supports file downloading, streaming audio and video (RTSP). Also with a built-in RSS support the new content from supported Web sites can be automatically pushed to the user.

Technicalities

The CPU of the Storm is a dual core MSM7600 from Qualcomm with ARM11 400 MHz and ARM9 274 MHz. Its battery is a replaceable, rechargeable DX-1 Li-ion battery boasting to provide up to 5.5 hours of GSM talk time or 6 hours of CDMA talk time with a standby time of 15 days (356 hours). The device has a 1GB onboard memory; 128MB NVRAM and an expandable memory slot supporting microSD card of up to 32GB. The device also features a built in camera of 3.2 megapixel with flash, autofocus, and video recording capabilities having a maximum resolution of 480 x 352 pixels. It has Bluetooth 2.0 therefore Bluetooth Stereo Audio via A2DP and AVCRP is also supported.