After previewing the Blackberry Storm at Geek Terminal – courtesy of Paddy Tan from Bak2u – I was itching to get my hands on one for more detailed ‘testing’
After some hassling, a friend who obtained a Storm overseas finally agreed to let me have a go at it. After picking it up at the MRT Station, I happily swapped out the simcard from my office-issue Blackberry 8820 once I returned to the office. I definitely didn’t like the design of the simcard slot and I wished RIM had design it like the Pearl or the 7290s. It is damned difficult to remove the simcard inserted in the Storm. Even the iPhone comes with a little hole where a pin can be inserted to eject the simcard!
Anyway, in spite of my earlier perception, the Blackberry Storm is just about as large as the 8820, with one notable difference. The USB slot that the Storm use is different from those of its predecessors since the 7290. That means, after upgrading from another Blackberry model to the Storm, the old USB cable can no longer be used, unlike the old ones where it is interchangeable between the 7100, 7290, 81xx, 870x, 88xx etc. That shouldn’t be an issue since it’s the standard mini-USB cable, not some proprietary cable that Sony Ericsson is very fond of using. I would skip the specifications since they can be found on RIM’s website.
So after putting in the simcard and the battery, the Storm (like all Blackberry handsets) automatically powered up. Just like the any other Blackbery, it still takes awhile to initialise and power up. Once the handset established a connection with the M1 mobile network, I look for the Blackberry browser icon and fired up the browser. The first site I visited was of course my own blog. I had to see for myself how that compares to the browser on the iPhone.
Compared to the 8820 where the blog loads oddly, with certain parts appearing where they shouldn’t, the Storm loaded it much like my desktop browser would, albeit in a minimised state. As far as appearance is concerned, it doesn’t look very much different when loaded on the iPhone. Unlike the iPhone where finger gestures zooms in or out, on the Storm you tap the screen once to zoom in, and if I recalled correctly, it isn’t as easy to zoom out. I would admit that definitely wouldn’t appeal to iPhone users at all!
Anyway, I wasn’t very familiar in navigating on the Storm’s browser, but after awhile I did found out I could toggle it show a little pointer which I can move around with my finger just like I did with the scroll ball on the 8820. The actual Plurk page failed to load properly, but the mobile version worked, though I have no idea why it came up in simplified Chinese mode just like any other mobile phone – a problem that does not exist on the 8820. Sadly, the original OS that RIM installed on this particular Storm did not have Asian language support so I could see zilch when some plurks appeared in other languages.
Back to the main screen of the Storm. The arrangement of the icons also looked a little different. I have yet to figure out how I can hide or move the icons. I found out that Instant messengers are now assigned to its own sub-folder, while applications goes to another. This is very unlike the older models where everything is loaded on the same screen and you can rearrange them as you like.
I tried downloading some programs and I am not sure whether it’s just psychological, but everything seems to install faster. Installing Bloomberg Mobile, Windows Live Messenger and Facebook were all under a few minutes. That’s comparable to the 3G Blackberry 8707.
The Storm comes with what I called a ‘feedback’ capacitive touchscreen. For the uninitiated, that means you have to actually press on the screen itself to activate something. This is unlike the iPhone where just tapping the icon will do. I originally disliked this feature while my friend Alex loved it. He mentioned that prevents him from activating the wrong icon since touch screens he has worked with, have the tendency to ‘misinterpret’ his touches and activate things even when he didn’t want them to. I begin to appreciate this feature after that.
Sending a message is not as easy as the other Blackberry models. That is perhaps the reason why most people say that the Storm is slow. The touch screen is at times not as sensitive near the edges perhaps because of the way it is designed. Surprisingly, this is also where I actually start to appreciate the Storm’s ‘feedback’ touch screen, and understand the point my friend Alex raised. The reason being that it reduced my errors when typing since I can now see what lights up under my fingers before I press on it. After a while one would notice that when the wrong letter or number (such as the keys ‘f’ and ‘g’) keeps lighting up when touched with one thumb, using the other thumb will do just fine. I am sure some people would hate that but that has reduced my use of the backspace key and prevents me from ‘over-stretching’ one thumb to the other side of the screen. I suspect that would actually reduce the risk of dropping the set.
Still, I didn’t quite like the on-screen keyboard because it covered up much of the screen when entering text in landscape mode. The on-screen keypad in portrait mode isn’t much better, because it isn’t as easy to use as that of the Pearl or the any other mobile phones. These are some of the things I definitely hope that RIM will fix in a new OS release!
Of course, there’s one thing I definitely hate about the Storm. At times, when just slightly tilted, it changes from portrait to landscape or vice versa. Then at times I actually had to shake the damned thing so that it becomes aware of the change of orientation. Also, it will continue to do this even when the device is locked, and I personally think that is a waste of energy.
My take is that the Blackberry Storm is quite adequate for users like me who uses it to browse the web, or reply to messages and SMS infrequently. It should also meet some of the basic multimedia needs – like taking quick photos, storing music (there’s a slot for a mini-SD card) etc. I am quite sure users who like things fast will definitely hate it.
Anyway I did not have the chance to try out intensively the other multimedia features though the few pictures I took in low-light mode with the camera are quite bad. I wished I had uploaded them before I ‘bricked’ the device. [Note: To ‘brick’ a device simply means rendering it completely inoperable while attempting to update it.]
So how the hell I ‘bricked’ the Storm? I decided I wanted to find out how Chinese pinyin text input would look like. I also wanted to see how well does it support East Asian languages on the display so I downloaded the latest OS release available to one of the telcos in Singapore. Yep, it doesn’t matter they just had the Storm available on that same day [24-Apr-09]!
Just like I would upgrade the OS of any other Blackberry, I checked that the version of my Desktop Manager is compatible with the Storm, happily fired it up and selected what I want to install. All went well for the first stage, in which the Storm would restart for the first time.
Desktop Manager patiently waited for the Storm to signal that it’s ready for Stage Two, which never happened. After several minutes, it timed out.
On my system, the USB detection for the Storm goes up and down every few minutes. When I unplugged the Storm to check, and I found it is stuck in perpetual reboot mode (starts up -> white screen -> error too fast for me to catch -> repeats).
For the next 4 hours I attempted to recover the device with articles obtained from RIM’s official knowledge base. None of which worked. By then it was 5am in which I was so exhausted that I simply knocked out after crawling to my bed.
The next day I informed my sheepish friend. I assured him I hadn’t tried updating with some hacked, beta or leaked OS. Because he obtained this set overseas, he was also concerned that RIM might consider the warranty void and refuse to replace it. After contacting RIM, it appeared that they have come across such issues before and without much fuss offered to replace it for free as long as we pay to ship ‘the brick’ back to them.
While all is well, I am a little concerned with this because updating the OS on the Blackberry has always been hassle free. I had updated at least 50 or so Blackberry handsets from ancient 7730s to 8820s. Articles on the RIM knowledge base would resolve any issues as long as I looked hard enough. I really hope this is a one off case, because users might get even more frustrated with the Storm if they are already frustrated by the interface.