I have been using a BlackBerry Storm for quite some time now, and I have only recently updated the OS to 4.7.0.186 after meeting up with Nicole to check out the Storm 2 passed to her for review. Don’t get me wrong, upgrading the device OS to 4.7 won’t make your Storm a Storm 2, because in the core the Storm 2 is a different creature entirely. The Storm 2 also comes with WIFI and I had always complained about Research in Motion [RIM] releasing models that are 3G but not WIFI-capable and WIFI-capable models which are non-3G. Whatever RIM’s business strategy is, it is my considered opinion that a manufacturer should just put in everything available, as long as it does not cost them significantly to do so. Whether the area support the technology provided, or whether the user uses is no reason to remove a feature.
Anyway, I liked the Storm 2 a lot better than the Storm. The feel of the SurePress touchscreen on the Storm 2 was definitely way better than version 1.0. Nicole subsequently informed me that even DK also agrees the successor is way better. He was so annoyed with the Storm previously, he just passed it to her for review after a few minutes.
Anyway, the reason I haven’t gone all the way to OS 5.0.0.451 on the Storm is because there isn’t yet an East Asian version available. No East Asian means no Chinese text input and I won’t go without that. Nicole and I had several chats on the Storm / Storm 2 and she came to the conclusion that as far as these two models of BlackBerry Smart Phones are concerned, a user will either love it or hate it. To add on, the Storm is a product I will use, but one I probably won’t recommend to others. The reason is not because it’s terrible, since it had met all my usage requirements. It is just my personal opinion that some users might find their experience very unpleasant when using it.
In short, unlike iFreaks who have 101 excuses to justify for every bad thing about the iPhone, I will follow my conscience and talk about some of the features I didn’t like – for e.g. Copy & Paste, and zooming, not to mention the long start up time when you reset the phone. Anyway, I did not play with the Storm 2 long enough for me to tell whether it has significantly improve over these features, so do not take my rants into consideration until you see the Storm 2 for yourself.
It will be difficult for me to put down in words everything I dislike about the Storm’s Copy & Paste and zoom feature. So I did a series of screen shots to make it easier for me to explain it.
| I loaded up one of my Plurks on the BlackBerry Storm as an example. (By default, my BlackBerry Browser is in ‘Pan’ Mode.) |  |
| Same Plurk shown here. Tap the screen once and it brings up the little ‘toolbar’ below. (Yep, don’t have to press or do anything, just tap it.) |  |
| Let me bring up the menu and toggle ‘Select’ mode. |  |
| As a long time BlackBerry user, I tapped the screen once to indicate where I want to start selecting text, and then slowly slide the finger across the screen. Just like what I would have done using a track ball / track wheel cousin. |  |
| FAIL!! I had only moved slightly to the right and then everything on the screen was selected. Frankly, for months I still haven’t figured out how to select text in this mode. I have tried tapping it at one corner, then another but to no avail. (I scrolled up the screen so the other selected text will be visible.) |  |
| Let me tap the screen once to bring up the ‘toolbar’ and change to ‘Cursor’ mode instead. (The ‘Cursor’ mode is very much like using the track ball or track wheel on earlier BlackBerry models.) |  |
| Noticed the icon change on the ‘toolbar’ after I changed mode? I brought up the menu and toggled ‘Select’ mode again. |  |
| SUCCESS!! I did exactly the same thing as I did on ‘Pan’ mode but this works. I joked with Nicole that by now, an iFreak would have finished cutting and pasting at least 10 times on his iPhone. (Again, I scrolled up the page so the text which are not selected are shown.) |  |
| Now if I want to copy the text I just need to press the icon ‘Copy’ (highlighted) on the toolbar and it will be done. |  |
| Next, I move on to demonstrate the ‘Zoom’ feature. To zoom, press the icon ‘Zoom’ (highlighted) on the screen. |  |
| Now it’s zoom in, dead center. |  |
| If I hit zoom again, this is what I will see, and this is the most it will ever go. You can’t zoom anything more than that. |  |
| If you want to zoom in at a particular area, you need to press on the screen at the area you want to zoom into. (In my case, around the word ‘install’. This is where it is zoomed once.) |  |
| Similarly, this is the largest it will zoom. In short, there are just two zoom levels, medium and large. |  |
Anyway, several hours after I finished the screen shots (and the first version of this post), I discovered a easier way to copy a block of text in ‘Pan’ mode. All I need to do is tap once on the start, then at the end and it would selected the text desired. Not surprising, since FoxTwo told me the Palm already have a feature which allow you to click on one point, and on another to select the text in between a very long time ago. Shameful that it took me so long to rediscover this. The price of not reading the manual and assuming that I have used BlackBerry Smartphones so long I don’t need to read it *slaps forehead*. I had forgotten that a touch screen smartphone would behave like… a Palm, the ancestor of all Palm sized handhelds. After all, most smartphones these days arrange icons in a grid, and on touch screens our fingers have replaced the stylus.
Whatever the case is, the BlackBerry Storm’s touch screen has this non multi-touch feel. The absence of the ‘pinch and zoom’ (or reverse a zoom) features aside (since it is patented by Apple and thus RIM cannot reproduce that on the Storm), selecting a specific area to zoom-in is not available. On top of which, the ‘pinch and zoom’ feature is available on the Nexus and Palm Pre, so there is a question of how much that patent actually covers.
While a friend pointed out that ‘pinch and zoom’ is nothing more than meaningless gesture to make the iPhone look high tech and revolutionary, the best I can do is still zoom dead center on a pre-selected point just twice (large, then larger) on the Storm! Granted that zooming in on the point I tapped is actually isn’t significantly different from a ‘pinch and zoom’ as that also zooms in on a point, the main difference here is that the user cannot control the ‘depth’ of the zoom. That inevitably makes a user feel the technology on the Storm to be ‘ridiculously outdated’. Thus, if the Storm did not have much impact in the touch screen smartphone competition, I am not really surprised. In a separate discussion with FoxTwo, he mentioned that if a feature is available on another device and you are a device in the same class, it is best to make that feature also available, unless it has been condemned to be utterly stupid or useless. It doesn’t really matter whether the user use it or not, just put in it and make no excuse like iFreaks do for the iPhone when they are confronted with the obvious handicaps.
Thus, these are the reasons why I won’t recommend the BlackBerry Storm to anybody, even though I personally find it good enough for my usage. It will be hard to convince the user of today – ‘pampered’ by all the other feature packed smartphones – to consider the Storm. The best I can do would be to offer my set to my friends to evaluate if they want to know more, and let them decide whether they can live with it.
The only good news is I heard is RIM has acquired Webkit and it will soon release a new browser for the BlackBerry smartphones. I hope the new browser will do more to improve user experience on not just the Storm series of BlacBerry smartphones, but even on their qwerty-keyboard based products.
By the way, I also told Nicole my ‘crackpot idea’ of sticking a track pad at the back of a mobile phone with a large screen, and that would still give us a smartphone with capabilities almost similar to a touch screen. I thought of this when I was working on my BlackBerry Storm one day, and my idle fingers were just roaming all over the back cover. I thought that would be cool since we won’t soil the screen anymore and we won’t be spending our time wiping it. Nicole mentioned to me that such a product – the Motorola Backflip – already exists. Apparently, some times even ‘crackpot ideas’ are conceived in big companies.
Wahahah ok slightly misunderstood me about the copy and paste in Palm. For text, Palm did it like Windows – tap and drag to select which portion of text you want, exactly like how you do it in Notepad or MS Word.
Only for pictures then you tap corner 1, tap corner 2, everything in between forms a rectangle and it zooms that way.
.-= FoxTwo´s last blog ..I’m A Logitech Man! =-.