Verizon Wireless will soon offer the BlackBerry that Apple should fear. Find out why in our full BlackBerry Storm review.
Review summary of the RIM BlackBerry Storm 9530:
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 The BlackBerry Storm offers a surprising amount of innovation and usability for a touchscreen business phone, and it couldn't come at a better time for RIM or Verizon Wireless. The clickscreen navigation setup works very well, and deftly solves the problem of dealing with RIM's long menus on a touchscreen phone. The phone could use a bit of a power boost, as it was sluggish opening and closing apps, or moving between functions. But the screen was gorgeous and plenty responsive, and typing on the BlackBerry Storm's keyboard is better than typing on any other touchscreen. We still think there's room for improvement, especially polishing up the calendar and address book to make them look as crisp and modern as the main menus and media player apps. But even with these minor complaints, we have no trouble declaring the BlackBerry Storm the most compelling BlackBerry phone to date. Release: November 2008. Price: $50.
Pros: Great clickable screen helps add tactile feel to touch interface. Best software QWERTY keyboard we've seen. Solid set of messaging apps. Loads of features.
Cons: Interface is still sluggish, a bit buggy. Screen scrolls responsively, but everything else moves slowly, including response to hardware buttons. No Wi-Fi. Mediocre camera. Lousy Web browser.
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Full RIM BlackBerry Storm 9530 Review:
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Design - Very good
RIM has always been known for their keyboard designs, so we've long been curious how the BlackBerry maker would approach an all-touch design. To produce a software keyboard with a tactile feel, RIM created a clickable screen for the BlackBerry Storm. The phone still uses an ultra-sensitive capacitative touchscreen, similar to what you'll find on the Apple iPhone 3G (compare). You swipe your finger across the long menus for which RIM has become infamous, and when your selection is highlighted, you click the screen to confirm. Sometimes swiping your finger scrolls the list instead of moving the selection highlight. Tap lightly to scroll or select, then press hard to click and make your choice. It's an elegant way of handling the touch interface, and it worked very well in every aspect of this phone, from typing on the keyboard to scrubbing through music tracks to simply managing the menus. RIM has a real innovation on their hands, and this could be a game-changer for folks who have shied away from all-touch phones in the past.
Beyond the clickable screen, RIM has made other improvements to the interface to make it more touch friendly. It's a very similar theme design to what we saw on BlackBerry OS 4.6 on the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 and the BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220. On the BlackBerry Storm, though, the buttons are larger, the menus fonts are sized for fingers and not trackballs, and there seems to be a bit more visual flourish, as if the flashing icons will entice fingertips even better.
The phone itself feels good in the hand, but upon close inspection it seems like a hodge podge of executive styles. On the front, there is a chrome bumper and glossy piano black accents; around back there is a soft-touch paint finish on the top and bottom, and the battery cover is a brushed-metal gunmetal grey. It's a nice looking phone, but RIM probably could have focused on any one of these styles and still come out ahead.
The phone could be very sluggish. Though scrolling and navigation were usually responsive, moving between programs caused a delay. Sometimes, the phone took a couple seconds to respond to button presses. Sometimes the menu button got no response whatsoever. We also encountered some bugs. While trying to enter our password in RIM's Google Talk app, the program actually quit and opened up the camera app. We didn't press the button accidentally, we swear, it just went to the camera, and wouldn't let us take a picture. Strange. Sometimes, we would be swiping our finger on the screen to make a pre-click selection, but the phone would lag behind our movement. Thus, when we clicked on the screen, nothing would happen, because we weren't pressing in the spot where the selection cursor had come to rest.
Calling - Very good
Calls on our BlackBerry Storm review unit sounded pretty good. We preferred the sound of the RIM BlackBerry Bold on AT&T, but though the BlackBerry Storm had a slightly tinny sound in our calling tests, the quality was consistent across our testing grounds, and callers had no trouble hearing us clearly. The phone got stronger reception than other Verizon Wireless phone's we're testing now. It always seemed to have a full 4-5 bars, even while other phones dipped close to roaming. For battery life, we've been testing the phone on a full charge for a coupe days, and for general e-mail and calling it seemed to hold onto its juice. Activating VZ Navigator drained the battery very quickly, though not as quick as we would have suspected, considering the wide range of resources that a talking, moving navigation program uses.
Because the BlackBerry Storm doesn't have a keyboard always available, you can't jump right into searching the contact list from the Home screen. However, Contacts is a top-level icon, and it was easy to search the list using either the portrait-view SureType keyboard layout or the full-QWERTY in landscape view. The phone has an abusively loud speakerphone, which we liked very much. Conference calling seemed to suffer because of the phone's sluggishness. We were already a few seconds into our second call when the calling screen decided to change its option from "New Call" to "Join." Once we had all three lines connected, the phone didn't do a great job displaying the calls we had in progress. There's room for improvement here. Happily, the BlackBerry Storm comes through with a dedicated key for speaker-independent voice dialing, and the voice dialing app worked great in our tests.
Messaging - Very good
If the BlackBerry Storm were only loaded with the standard BlackBerry messaging options, it would still be a capable phone. But Verizon Wireless and RIM have gone a step further in providing the Application Center, where many of RIM's popular messaging apps are waiting for download. In addition to the solid SMS and MMS options, there are also IM clients available for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk, as well as the standard BlackBerry Messenger for talking just to other BlackBerry devices. For e-mail, we had the BlackBerry e-mail client set up our Gmail account, which it handled with no trouble or special settings from us. We liked that the e-mail app could download pictures to display in line with messages, but we wished it could handle full-HTML e-mails as well, as Windows Mobile and other smartphones can.
Typing on our BlackBerry Storm review unit is a great experience, though not entirely perfect. The onscreen keyboard itself was very responsive, and the clicking action helped the experience a great deal, making the keys seem more realistic. We wish that the phone had better auto-correction. It will offer a list of alternative choices, allowing you to auto-complete a word or correct a mistake. But for fast typing, though the Apple iPhone's keyboard doesn't feel nearly as tactile, it was ultimately more accurate for us because of its excellent auto-correct feature.
The BlackBerry Storm also has an interesting quirk to the keyboard. If your right hand tries to cross the aisle and type on the left-hand part of the screen, the keyboard becomes much less accurate. Probably having to do with the way fingers are angled as they press the screen, the BlackBerry Storm's full-QWERTY layout is made for two-handed, my-side / your-side typing, and it just doesn't work any other way.
Scheduling and productivity - Very good
The BlackBerry Storm comes with a nice selection of Office apps courtesy of DataViz and the DocumentsToGo suite. So, you can open and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the go. DataViz holds back some features, like the ability to create new Word docs, for the premium edition. But the suite was very useful nonetheless for basic reading and editing. The calendar app hasn't seen the visual upgrade we've been hoping for, though it still looks great on the BlackBerry Storm's screen. Instead of requiring you to dig through menus to switch calendar views, the BlackBerry Storm gets onscreen icons to toggle the week, month or daily views. We'd like to see this continue throughout the phone's interface, replacing menus with a more visual approach, wherever possible. Mostly, though, we'd just like to see a nicer-looking calendar. Otherwise, the scheduling app is robust and powerful, and we had no trouble creating appointments and inviting our colleagues to join us at meetings.
Multimedia - Very good
The BlackBerry Storm uses a screen that is the same resolution as the display on the Apple iPhone, and the BlackBerry Bold, for that matter. At 480 by 360 pixels, the BlackBerry Storm's screen looks great, and we were very happy with its video performance. The Storm handled the same DRM-free h.264 files that we have loaded on our iPhone, and in side-by-side tests, the BlackBerry Storm looked even better playing back the same content. The screen seemed to be more rich, with better contrast, which made colors seem deeper and more saturated.
The phone also handled all of our music tracks without any trouble. We synchronized music from Windows Media Player, and our album covers came through as big wallpapers while the songs were playing. Playback controls were minimal, and there were no EQ options, but it was easy to drag through and skip our least favorite parts of songs and videos. We wish that playlist creation was easier. We loved the ability to type and search through media files, but we wish that RIM had a better way to add multiple songs to a playlist.
Our biggest problem, though, came while transferring music and video. On the Windows side, this wasn't any trouble, as Windows Media Player handled the sync. On the Mac side, our BlackBerry Storm review unit didn't show up as a mass storage device, so we had no way to drag and drop our files onto the included media card. We had to use a separate reader, and then our files came through fine.
Clearly RIM is taking media seriously with this device. The BlackBerry Storm includes a 3.5mm headphone jack, but most impressively it also comes equipped with a whopping 9GB of memory in the box. That's 1GB of internal memory, which would have been a nice amount, and then an extra 8GB microSD card already loaded into the slot.
Camera - Mediocre
The camera on the BlackBerry Storm should have been much better. After all, with auto focus, a 3.2-megapixel sensor and plenty of advanced settings for shooter, you might expect the camera will take decent photos, worth uploading or maybe printing. Unfortunately, we were much more impressed with the uploading options than with the actual pictures we took. Colors seemed sapped out of even the most exciting scenes, as Times Square and our little hot pink action figure were both rendered drab. Noise was somewhat of a probem, though there was a nice amount of detail in pics when the auto focus was doing its job correctly.
Times Square tall building
Times Square traffic
These two shots were quite disappointing. In the first, the sky seems to be turning strange colors, and the lack of detail make the old-fashioned sign on the Times Square Police station look just plain old. In the second scene, this distance shot of Times Square itself is almost completely unusable, as any details farther than a few feet from us look cartoonish and blurry.
Self portrait
Likewise, the BlackBerry Storm wasn't very good at self-portrait shots. It was tough to hold the camera properly, as the mid-range placement of the camera button meant we occasionally also squeezed the voice recognition button on the other side. Also, without a mirror, it was tough to line up our shot. This picture here was our best out of five, and it was still very blurry, with lousy color and detail.
eBay shot
The exciting orange and yellow flames on this action figure card are almost completely dried out, making the colors look more like dead, fallen leaves than exciting, action graphics.
Figurine close-up
This shot, taken under our studio lamps in a light tent, is most disappointing. While the detail is nice and well-focused, the colors are all wrong. This figure is hot pink and brightly colored. In this picture, the little guy looks sickly and washed out.
GPS - Very good
The BlackBerry Storm comes with both BlackBerry Maps and VZ Navigator. You'll want to stick with the latter for turn-by-turn navigation. We liked VZ Navigator on this phone, though the app wasn't as responsive as we'd hoped it would be. The GPS sensor was good, and it found us very quickly whether we were in the New Jersey suburbs or the concrete jungles of Manhattan. The maps on screen, though, wouldn't move around when we dragged them with our fingers. Zooming was easier, but panning the maps was more difficult. Also, VZ Navigator has so many different screens to cycle through, it was easy to get lost to the point where we couldn't navigate back to the simple mapping navigation screen.
Web browsing - Good
The Web browser on the BlackBerry Storm will only please BlackBerry fanatics. Those poor souls have had to suffer with the sub-par browsers on every other BlackBerry device, even up to and including the BlackBerry Bold. Finally with the Storm the BlackBerry platform gets a browser that looks okay, but it was not a solid performer by any stretch. Our own homepage was a mess, rendered with poorly balanced columns and a layout that was almost as bad as we'd expect from Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile. The New York Times fared a bit better, and at least the layout for that site was square, though it was still missing many details and images.
The browser was nice and fast, though. The phone uses Verizon Wireless' 3G network for Web browsing, there is no Wi-Fi on board. Normally, with a speedy 3G phone, we aren't as worried about Wi-Fi. But RIM and Verizon Wireless seem interested in pushing applications to this device into the future, and for that we would like to see a speedy way to download apps over-the-air, without using our desktops as a conduit. So, the Web browser may not be good enough to make us miss Wi-Fi, but the Application Manager is.
Price and availability
The BlackBerry Storm will be available through Verizon Wireless from Friday, November 21, 2008, for $200 with a contract agreement and mail-in rebate.
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