Phones: Blackberry Storm Smartphone Review

By the time this issue of Tone hits the shelves, President-elect Barack Obama will take office. That’s nice, you say, but what’s it got to do with smart phones? Quite a bit actually: the President of the United States will have to surrender his beloved Blackberry due to White House security protocol. He’s said to be devastated.

I would be too, seeing as I love my ‘berry more than my brother (really). So when the latest model, the lovely ‘Storm’, arrived at the Tone offices I jumped at the chance to give it a test-drive. Let me tell you, it has been a blast.

There’s no way a bunch of slackers designed the Storm. Clearly a lot of thought has gone into this lovely phone. It’s just the right size to fit comfortably in your hand, and is beautifully presented with a piano black finish. Its most notable physical virtue is of course its huge high-resolution touch screen, which has a 360-degree view.  This revolutionises the Blackberry and puts it in market competition with the world’s touch screen smart phone Lord (that’d be the iPhone).

This isn’t any old touch screen though, as instead of just ‘touching’ the buttons, you press them like clicking a mouse. This immediately makes the Storm very cool, as it gives better control when touching a key or selecting an application and prevents accidental activation. Not even the Jesus phone can do this.

As for its multimedia functions, they rock. The 3.2 megapixel camera is quite sizeable (the iPhone has 2 megapixels) and sports autofocus, a flash and a zoom. The photos I took were fantastic, even in low light and in the evening. When I Bluetoothed them to my iMac I was really impressed by the quality. The only issue was the slow focusing times – definitely not good for action shots. Videos were great to film, and watch. Yep, I really love the lusty big high-res screen.

Totally intuitive, the Storm was a breeze (pun intended) to use. Getting my email accounts to sync took seconds, browsing was a doddle and my favourite celebrity gossip sites looked great on the screen. Cutting and pasting into messages was seamless (did I mention the iPhone doesn’t cut ‘n’ paste?).

Unlike its newly launched family member, the Blackberry Bold, the Storm is not built with wi-fi functionality. Overseas reviewers have wailed about this obvious lack, but quite frankly here in New Zealand it isn’t a big deal. We aren’t exactly teeming with free wi-fi spots, are we now? You can access the web via your Vodafone contract anyway.

Sadly here is where I must grumble. The Storm’s battery life is bogus. I practically made it squeal with exertion on its first day with all my web browsing, downloads, phone calls and photography, but even in my much quieter periods where I only checked emails and sent a few texts, it didn’t last longer than two days maximum. This isn’t the end of the world, just means you should keep a charger in your desk drawer. You’ll want to do that anyway, since the Storm will never leave your side once you make it your own.

Keeping It Real

The ability to read email in real-time has made Blackberries (the phone, not the fruit) so famously addictive in America that they’re commonly known as ‘Crackberries’. That’s of course a reference to the very addictive street form of cocaine – crack.

Indeed, a whole branch of blackberry related terms have popped up around the use of this smart phone: ‘berry blister’, for instance, is a term for a sore thumb from keyboard overuse. There are even entire websites devoted to the Blackberry and its legions of devotees. Check out www.crackberry.com to see for yourself.

TECH SPECS

Black Berry Smartphone $999

NETWORK: Vodafone 3G broadband (HSPA)

MEMORY: 1GB onboard, expandable with microSD card

STANDBY: Up to 360 hours

GENERAL FEATURES:

• 360 degree perspective rotation
• 3.25 inch SurePress touch screen
• QWERTY keyboard
• 3.2MP Camera,
• Video recording
• Organiser
• Web browser
• Blackberry Maps
• Wireless email
• Media player
• Built-in GPS
• Corporate data access
• Size: 112 x 62 x 13mm
• Weight: 155g

CONTACT

www.vodafone.co.nz

PROS

• Make it click

• What a beauty
• Screen is a biggie
• Easy peasy to use

CONS

• Battery life
• Wi-fi, or lack thereof
• Slow autofocus

VERDICT

Mostly smitten.

3/5

JESKA INNES

This is a web exclusive Tone review.