MichaelRunyon.com – All Things Geek

I (most generously) received a Blackberry Storm through a work plan just before Christmas. For those of you who haven’t seen the pervasive TV ads and CDMA hype, the Blackberry Storm is the first touch-screen Blackberry. What’s different about it is the haptic feedback built inherently into the device. The screen clicks as you interact with it, letting you know the difference between your selection and your actual mechanism of motion. Sweet, right? I know that I was elated to get one, and my wife was supremely jealous. But what I’ve found is that, like many first generation products, there are some flaws. Some even serious ones. 

The main selling of the phone over the iPhone and over phones is that it’s a Blackberry. There is already an army of Blackberry users out there, mostly corporate warriors, who are in the field constantly checking and sending email. A touch screen device that utilizes all of it’s beautiful 4″ screen and still allows them to use the time tested tools that RIM and the Blackberry provide make it a home run to the established crowd. 

I, however, am in with the Joes who have never used an iPhone or a Blackberry. My experience with the device thus far has been mixed, but positive. My screen is still responding to clicks from my fingers, unlike my co-worker, who has had to send for a replacement after just 2 weeks. His is a common problem, one that the community is rapidly coming up with fixes for, but still irritating for a launched product. I found the typing to be a little aggravating at times, the letters being selected from the screen a little differently than I had imagined them to be. I found the SureType keyboard ( a virtual software keyboard laid out like the original Blackberry keyboard) to be much more useful at typing anything but extremely precise names or URLs. 

Verizon’s network thus far has been pretty good. I have gotten reasonably good service in some locations that I had terrible or no service with T-Mobile, always a plus. The speed of my phone, especially in the office and around the house, is quite good as well. The same cannot always be said of the phone itself. It doesn’t automatically close programs and gets quite bogged down if you leave more than a couple of applications open, causing you to have to (somewhat laboriously) manually select and close running programs. 

Another problem with the phone that I’ve had is with the media playback. I looked up some of the codecs available for the audio and video, but even after conforming to those, had some issues playing anything but the most basic files. I had to get a special converter to wrap my videos in a 3GP wrapper (MP4 core) to get them to play right on my phone. Even the videos that the video recorder on the phone took won’t play, which is especially weird and irritating. 

On to the camera….two words: it sucks. It really does. It’s 3.2 MP, which caused excitement at first. It even has a nifty LED flash. But…it takes forever to focus, the flash is blindingly bright and off-color, it’s focus is easily disturbed by motion and light change…it just overall sucks. It is not useful for pretty much anything except taking pictures of non moving objects in well lit areas. Really. And how often does that situation present itself, when you aren’t already taking a picture of something?

Everything else has been pretty fun. the IM clients for MSN and AIM work well. The email app is a slam dunk (no surprises there). RIMs servers have been beating my POP server every 45 seconds looking for new emails and in heavy traffic, my phone beeps a lot. But that’s OK…somewhat to be expected, even. It’s pretty easy to retrieve and open attachments, view them, respond to emails, etc. It’s nice to be so connected in some ways. 

The GPS issue is somewhat troublesome. Verizon wants you to pay for and use their VZ Navigator software, which costs $7/month. They did enable GPS to work with BlackBerry Maps, but that software kinda stinks. I installed Google Maps, which works wonderfully with cell tower triangulation of your location (within 3000 meters or so), but it doesn’t offer turn by turn directions or real-time, precise GPS locations. It still works pretty well without it, but kinda annoying that Verizon disabled access to the GPS chip.

My last gripe (and not really even a gripe) is the lack of applications. There are probably 20-30 applications out there for the Storm, and quite a few of them are just re-revved apps from the past Blackberry lines. But, the product just launched and i’m certain that Verizon will try to take advantage of the App Store concept that has worked so well with the iPhone. I’m anxious to get my feet wet developing my own apps for the phone. I would love to make some apps for my homegrown budget software and maybe replicate (with much less pinache) some of the cooler apps that I’ve seen for the iPhone. 

Overall, a great phone, works well for what it’s intended for. I’ll agree in general with critics that it was rushed to market, but as long as BB keeps updating their firmware, and the apps keeping growing, I’ll be more of a convert all the time….until my phone screen stops clicking, that is.