Tag: Blackberry Storm

BlackBerry Storm I – My Gripes

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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.

Blackberry Storm – Second Look

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The replacement Blackberry Storm which RIM sent from their HK Office actually arrived one week after I bricked the original set. I had managed to obtain it during the Vesak Day weekend for a second look.

It doesn’t look very much different from the previous set except this set has some East Asian language support – except for Japanese. Even though it maybe a fact that the Japanese has more superior 3G handsets, I find it odd that this Storm has no Japanese language support. Perhaps, it was just left out when it left the factory.

As a result of my previous experience, I find this Storm much easier to handle than the previous set. In fact, while it takes a bit of getting used to (which is the same when you moved from a Blackberry with a scroll-wheel to a scroll-ball one), the interface and performance is not as atrocious as what I have read. Basically, I failed to understand the bad reviews and comments I keep seeing in Twitter or in blogs about the Storm. While it may not be an iPhone killer and it may not live up to the performance expectations of some Blackberry users, it is still a beautiful set.

Anyway, on demand by some friends that I made some screen shots, I downloaded JL_Cmder (a javaloader utility) a while ago to capture them directly off the Storm instead of taking photos of it. I even deliberately touch some buttons so it will light up when the screen shot is captured. Enjoy!


OS Version
Wallpaper & Keypad
Main Screen #1

Main Screen #2
Phone Dialer
Browser in Portrait Mode

Zoom In (Portrait Mode)
Browser in Landscape Mode
Full Keyboard

Switching Languages

“Bricking” a Blackberry Storm

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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.