A new touchscreen BlackBerry from Vodafone and Verizon Wireless, boasting improved touch technology and BlackBerry OS 5, will soon hit store shelves.
Vodafone and RIM today introduced the BlackBerry Storm 2 smartphone for customers in seven European countries as well as South Africa. The second generation of RIM's touch-screen smartphone, the BlackBerry Storm 2 with BlackBerry OS 5, improves the BlackBerry touch-screen platform with new technology and new features.
Customers in the UK and Ireland will be able to get the new phone first through Vodafone, and it will be offered exclusively by Vodafone in Germany, Netherlands and Spain. It'll also be made available in France, Italy and South Africa before the holidays.
The BlackBerry Storm 2 smartphone introduces a new SurePress technology based on an electronic suspension system that provides the user with tactile feedback when the touch-screen is pressed. The new system responds equally to gentle pressure applied anywhere on the surface of the screen and claims to make clicking the display practically effortless. Typing on the phone's virtual keyboard is also claimed to be easier and more accurate. The new SurePress technology also allows the user to type a letter with one thumb even while their other thumb may still be touching or resting on another letter, enabling faster typing and multi-key actions such as Shift or Alt-key combinations.
The BlackBerry Storm 2 features a 3.25-inch capacitive touch screen with a resolution of 360 x 480 pixels at 184 ppi, 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus, 256MB of Flash memory (twice as much as the original), 2 GB on board memory storage and a microSD memory card slot supporting up to 32GB cards.
Vodafone's version of the Storm 2, the 9520, supports Quad-band GSM networks, HSPA 2100 MHz, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g (original lacked Wi-Fi) and Bluetooth 2.1. Verizon Wireless' version, the Storm 2 9550, will additionally support 3G EV-DO and CDMA. There's also built-in background noise suppression technology, loud distortion-free speakerphone and face detection (proximity sensor) that prevents accidental clicks and blank the screen while the user is on the phone.
For media fans, the BlackBerry Storm 2 incorporates a 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as a media player for videos, pictures and music, plus BlackBerry Desktop Manager for both PCs and Macs, and BlackBerry Media Sync for easily syncing iTunes and Windows Media Player with the smartphone. Vodafone's music store is also pre-installed.
Since the BlackBerry Storm 2 is powered by BlackBerry OS 5, users are promised a more responsive experience as well as improved usability and visual enhancements such as inertial scrolling, spin boxes that make it easier to set dates and times, gradient shading on buttons and more use of animation. Typing accuracy and selection have also been significantly refined. The BlackBerry Browser has been improved with faster JavaScript and CSS processing as well as offering support for Gears and BlackBerry Widgets.
Customers running BlackBerry Enterprise Server 5 will gain the ability to set follow-up Flags on the handset like they can in Microsoft Office Outlook, manage Microsoft Exchange e-mail folders on the handset, access remote file shares (Windows Shares), forward appointments and view calendar attachments on the handset, as well as benefit from wireless sync improvements for Contacts, including sync for multiple contact folders, personal Distribution Lists and contacts in Public/Shared folders.
The BlackBerry Storm 2 will ship with a 1400 mAh battery that promises up to 6 hours of talk time on 3G networks. The phone will be free with a two-year contract on Vodafone UK, while pricing for the other countries will be announced soon. There's no word on when Verizon Wireless will start offering the BlackBerry Storm 2, but an announcement should be just around the corner.
Check out the complete specifications of the BlackBerry Storm 2 here, revealing that Verizon Wireless' version will get a talk time of 5.5 hours on the carrier's network, but otherwise should be the same phone except for the model number and of course the EV-DO and CDMA support.
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