Verizon Wireless and RIM release a polished update to the original touchscreen BlackBerry. Find out more in our BlackBerry Storm 2 review.
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Storm 2:
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 If you are already decided on the BlackBerry Storm and you've only been waiting for RIM to fix the long list of problems with the first model, fear not, because the BlackBerry Storm 2 addresses almost all of the complaints buyers had with the original. The BlackBerry Storm 2 is faster, more responsive, built better and more feature-packed than the first Storm. Even so, the interface was wildly inconsistent, as if the phone could never remember when you're supposed to press and when you're supposed to lightly tap; when you're supposed to swipe or when you should just point. Sometimes, it simply didn't work. Sometimes, the interface design was so counterintuitive that we decided to give up. Even with the improvements, and they are significant, using the BlackBerry Storm 2 was a real chore, as the extra pressure required to 'click' makes every action a bit harder compared to other touchscreens. The interface design was continually frustrating, even while newer phones, like the HTC Hero on Sprint, manage to surprise and delight with clever and adaptive touchscreen interface ideas. All the basic BlackBerry features are present in the Storm 2, like the great integrated messaging inbox, the deep access for IT managers, and newer features like the BlackBerry App World and the tightly integrated Facebook app. Plus, the screen on the Storm 2 is one of the best we've seen on a phone, and it's great for watching movies and videos. But if you want BlackBerry features, buy a classic BlackBerry with a keyboard, and if you want a touchscreen phone, there are much better options on the market. Release: October 2009. Price: $180.
Pros: Faster, more responsive than original BlackBerry Storm. Fantastic display quality, great for movies. Well-organized messaging.
Cons: Interface design is frustrating and cumbersome, even when SurePress works well. Browser still lagging. Some features could use a serious graphical boost.
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Full RIM BlackBerry Storm 2 Review:
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Design – Good
Instead of opting for a normal touchscreen, RIM's BlackBerry Storm 2 acts as a sort of hybrid between a touchscreen and hardware buttons. First, you select an item on screen with your finger. Then, to seal the deal, you press the screen and feel a click. It's supposed to add a layer of physical response to the touch experience and to make typing on the phone seem more natural. As a result, it tends to add more effort to every single function, and a layer of confusion to the interface. Sometimes you have to press all the way down, sometimes you don't. Sometimes you can swipe your finger, but often the highlight won't follow your touch, you have to hop from choice to choice.
The system can deactivate the click sensation electronically and sometimes this happens when it shouldn't, leaving you stranded with nothing to press. In our testing period, we found plenty of inconsistencies in the interface design, and we never grew to appreciate the added click of the SurePress touchscreen. These problems impacted every feature on BlackBerry Storm 2.
There might be some buyers who prefer the SurePress feel, or buyers who need to buy a BlackBerry and insist on a touchscreen. For you folks, it isn't all bad news, because the BlackBerry Storm 2 still has a nice range of features, and it packs almost everything you'd expect from a BlackBerry. The screen on the BlackBerry Storm 2 is one of the best we've ever seen, bar none. For watching movies, it beats even the Apple iPhone 3GS, and everything from pictures to text to movies looked sharp on the Storm 2. The interface design is very menu-heavy, but also touch friendly on most screens. It isn't pretty, and the phone isn't customizable, but BlackBerry fans will feel right at home.
On the outside, the BlackBerry Storm 2 has abandoned the hodge-podge look of the original, and now it's a much more fit and trim device. The build quality is greatly improved, and the phone looks more like the new BlackBerry Tour than anything else. The main keys are integrated into the display, which is a bad move, since the display can be so janky and unreliable. For instance, if you rest your finger on one part of the display, then press the End button, you might get the End result, or you might get a click where your finger lies. In our tests, it seemed like the SurePress clicking action deactivated too many times when it was supposed to be registering our clicks.
Calling – Very Good
Calls on the BlackBerry Storm 2 sounded very good. Callers reported our voice had a nice, warm tone, though we sounded a bit clipped at the high end. On our side, things sounded even better, and conversations were always bright and clear. Reception on the BlackBerry Storm 2 wasn't great. The phone was always a bar or so behind the best of the Verizon Wireless devices we have on hand, usually averaging 2-3 bars down here in the greater Dallas suburbs. Battery life was good for a touchscreen phone, but not good for a BlackBerry device. In our tests, we always recorded talking time around the 5.5 hour mark before the Storm 2 would shut down the radios to conserve battery. That's on par with RIM's own estimates, but we're used to BlackBerry phones beating expectations for battery life by a mile. In normal use, we could easily get through a full day without charging the phone, but by lunch time the next day we'd have a brick on our hands.
For calling features, the BlackBerry Storm 2 packs all the basics, but we wish that RIM had gone further to make call handling and in-call management easier and more attractive. The phone handled conference calls well, and the speakerphone was as loud as we remembered from the first Storm. The Storm 2 lacks visual voicemail, which is odd, since plenty of Verizon Wireless phones use the feature. There's a button for speaker-independent voice dialing, and we did a lot of voice dialing in our tests, but mostly by accident. The voice dial button is inconveniently located directly across from the volume button, and it was quite sensitive, so we were constantly pressing it at the wrong moment, shutting off our music or quickly bringing our Web browsing session to a halt. You can reassign the button if you like, but then voice dialing wouldn't be so convenient.
Mac fans will be happy to hear that the BlackBerry Desktop client for Mac has finally been released, though it wasn't as feature packed as we were hoping for. You can synchronize your address book and calendar with your Mac, but you don't get the e-mail redirector software that RIM offers for BlackBerry phones on Windows machines, and you don't get the kind of deep access to the device that Microsoft provides with Windows Phones connected to a Windows machine.
Messaging – Very Good
BlackBerry phones all excel at messaging, and the BlackBerry Storm 2 is no exception. Setting up our personal e-mail accounts on the Storm 2 was no trouble, and soon we had a neatly organized inbox on the device collecting all our incoming e-mails, text messages, instant messages and even our Facebook correspondence. Verizon Wireless packs the Storm 2 with an Application Center download folder, separate from the BlackBerry App World, where you can download Instant Messaging for all your favorite services, including AOL, Yahoo, MSN, Google Talk and even MySpace. There's a full-fledged Facebook app, and Facebook will even synchronize with your calendar and address book on the Storm 2. Unfortunately, for business we use a Microsoft Exchange server, not a BlackBerry Enterprise Server account, and the BlackBerry Storm 2 can't handle Exchange directly, nor does the Macintosh software support a redirector to bounce our e-mails from our desktop to the phone.
With such a great messaging heritage to draw from, perhaps it isn't surprising that the e-mail app on the BlackBerry Storm 2 feels like the app best adapted for the touchscreen. You can use two fingers to select a range of e-mails, and the phone handled complicated HTML e-mails nicely. Text messages come through in threaded style, so you can see both sides of an SMS conversation at once. The BlackBerry Storm 2 also comes with the most recent BlackBerry Messenger client. BlackBerry Messenger is an instant messenger service that only works between BlackBerry devices, but it includes advanced features normally not found on mobile devices. With the new version, you can chat, share files and photos, and it even has an interesting bar code feature that lets you add friends quickly by using your BlackBerry to take a picture of a special bar code on their BlackBerry device.
We did not enjoy typing on the BlackBerry Storm 2's onscreen keys, and we felt the design could have been much smarter. The Storm 2 has plenty of features to help with typing issues. You can have the Storm 2 suggest words as you type, or you can switch to auto correct and, like the iPhone, the BlackBerry Storm 2 will guess what you were trying to say as you make mistakes. There's even a custom dictionary so you can add you're your own words and the BlackBerry will account for them. This worked very nicely in our tests, and the BlackBerry Storm 2 let us type fairly quickly. In fact, if you don't mind pressing a bit harder, the BlackBerry Storm 2 has one of the fastest keyboards we've used. But the constant button click slowed us down, and we prefer the smooth feel of a normal touchscreen.
The keyboard is also poorly designed for an onscreen QWERTY. When you tap a key, before you click, the key lights up, but your finger is covering the letter so it's hard to tell if you're in the right spot. Other software keyboards give you a clue that appears above your finger to help find the right key. Also, one of the best benefits of a software keyboard is that it can adapt to the current situation. Typing a Web address into the browser, the BlackBerry Storm 2 gave us a second period in place of the space bar. That's it. No @ symbol on the first layer, no ".com" key. Want to find that @ symbol? It's not under the symbol menu, it's under the "123" menu. This keyboard layout could have been much smarter, especially in context for the situation.
Business – Very Good
If you need to edit Word documents or other Office files on the go, the BlackBerry Storm 2 comes with a Standard edition of DataViz' Documents To Go. You can't create a new document, but you can edit existing docs to your heart's content, and if you load a bare, blank document onto the phone, you can get around the inability to create a new file. Needless to say the Storm 2's screen did not make fine-tuned editing easy. There's an interesting copy and paste feature that works with the phone's multi-touch capabilities, but the magnifying bars used to select text were difficult to control.
The calendar on the BlackBerry Storm 2 is completely unchanged from the original, and we suspect RIM has been using the same calendar since these phones were 2-way pager devices. It's ugly and blocky, but easy to read, and all of the features we need were there, even if they didn't look great.
Multimedia – Very Good
For some reason, RIM has buried the multimedia features on this device, even though the BlackBerry Storm 2 did a very nice job handling our music, and an even better job with video. The 3.2-inch, 480 by 360 pixel display on the Storm 2 is the best we've used for video playback. Movies looked lush and colorful, with smooth motion and no defects or pixelation that we could see. We watched a trailer for Pixar's "Up" on the phone, and it was truly dazzling. This should be a prime selling point for the Storm 2, and we wish that Media was a top-level folder. Instead, we had to dig 3-4 layers through the interface just to get to our media library.
The music features on the BlackBerry Storm 2 were also solid. The BlackBerry Desktop software did a nice job pulling our music and even playlists from our iTunes library and synchronizing them with the device. The Storm 2 comes packed with 2GB of internal memory, and though our review unit didn't come with a microSD card, we've heard that Verizon Wireless will be bundling a 16GB card with the Storm 2, which would be a great bonus. Verizon Wireless is also pre-loading the Slacker app on recent BlackBerry phones. Slacker is a great streaming music service that will also store a bundle of music locally on your microSD card so that you can keep listening even when you're out of network range. The phone uses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, though we wish it were placed on the top or bottom of the phone, as it juts out uncomfortably from the side.
Web browsing - Good
Web browsing on the BlackBerry Storm 2 was a real chore. The browser couldn't render many of our favorite pages, including Google Reader, and sometimes even the mobile version of a site came through poorly. Our own homepage looked okay, but layout was disjointed. The problematic interface design once again hurt the experience. You can navigate pages by flicking them, and they'll continue to move when you lift your finger, but only a little bit. Long pages and lists required lots of flicking. To zoom in, you can double tap on the screen without clicking, but there was no easy way to zoom out, and no multi-touch control to pinch and zoom in and out of pages. The navigation controls, with the more finely tuned zoom buttons, would sometimes disappear, and we couldn't figure out how to make them reappear. BlackBerry phones already lag behind in Web browsing, but throw in the frustration of the poorly implemented interface and we dreaded opening the browser in most cases. On the positive side, the new BlackBerry Storm 2 gets Wi-Fi support, an option sorely missing from the first Storm.
Camera - Mediocre
The camera on the BlackBerry Storm 2 was uninspiring. Pictures looked okay, certainly good enough for simple sharing on Web sites like Facebook or MySpace, but these pics weren't good enough to use full size as desktop wallpaper or to print. There are plenty of great uploading options for photos on the Storm 2. You can easily upload to Facebook, MySpace or Flickr, among other services, and uploading was quick and easy. Otherwise, photo management was a real chore. Just like with the Web browser, zooming and navigating between photos in our gallery was confusing and counterintuitive. We found ourselves sporadically jumping way too far in and out of zoom levels. There's some multi-touch control for zooming, but it was difficult to get the hang of.
For the camera itself, the BlackBerry Storm 2 uses a 2-stage button to auto focus before snapping a pic, but the button was so stiff that it was hard to feel the first stage. Colors on our pics could be off in either direction. On some shots, pictures looked lifeless and drab, drained of color. On other shots of colorful flowers, bright reds and oranges dominated the seen, over saturating their hues. Details were mostly lost from images viewed at a full crop, and though the camera offers a supposed close-up focal mode, the sensor was never able to capture a sharp image at close range. Check out our image samples below.
Red Flower
Time and Temperature
Outdoor Self Portrait
By the Pool
Flower Pot
Indoor Self Portrait with Flash
Leaf in the Water
GPS – Good
The BlackBerry Storm 2 comes with VZ Navigator for turn-by-turn directions, and we were disappointed that there weren't more GPS-enabled apps and services on this phone. VZ Navigator did a fine job handling navigation. We liked being able to dig right into our address book from VZ Navigator, and the service offered plenty of good suggestions from the point of interest database. A few times, the mapping application took us close to our destination, but couldn't quite figure out how to get to the finish line, though admittedly roads are constantly changing and being built in our area. We'd like to see some speech recognition on the Storm 2's build of VZ Navigator. We've used other Verizon Wireless phones that can input an address by listening to our commands, and on a touchscreen phone we think that feature is a necessity.
Price and availability
The BlackBerry Storm 2 for Verizon Wireless will be available in late October 2009.
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