The Blackberry Storm 9530, what was for a long while hyped to be the potential iPhone-killer from RIM: beautiful, sleek, the first touch-screen Blackberry, with all the functionality that was deemed lacking in the perfect fruit-phone. As are most things in comparison to Apple products, it lacks the final grooming that a manicured and coiffed showpiece from the Jobsness generally carries, but compared to the HTC devices I’ve had the Storm takes the cake in nearly every way. From the physical design to navigating, selecting, entering information – I find the device pleasant and easy to use from the get-go.
With the Storm, you certainly get a lot of functionality that Apple either ignored or decided we weren’t ready for – some “push” functions and copy/paste most notably. Windows Mobile devices have included most of the capabilities of the Storm for a long while, but minus the tremendous connectedness of a Blackberry. Going from a WinMo phone to a Storm is pretty simple once you learn that it’s a different universe and get the hang of the tools. I have a single friend with a G1, so I can’t be too specific about how it measures up – I have used it for about 15 minutes and it feels good, but I much prefer the size and feel of the Storm.
Without the Apple brand of design behind it, you lose the brilliant polish on the software, the snappy and fluid user interfaces, and the seamless integration of all the device’s functions; but you gain a lot of capabilities in the realm of customization, freedom to choose functionalities (enough with the jailbreaking, okay?), and most of all glorious email integration surpassed so far by no other service, in my opinion. Those who would upgrade from most WinMo devices gain, among other things, a rather solid business tool that includes a functional browser as well as a suave-looking hip-hanger that doesn’t seem like an injection-molded cereal toy. Bonus!
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Overall, the 9530 is so far the best smartphone I’ve ever owned and used regularly, and it’s my new beloved all-encompassing connected device. It’s only failings are the persistent ones of Blackberries past, and in that sense it is a bit of a failure – by introducing so much new functionality, RIM seems to have avoided solving any of the long-term Blackberry OS problems which carry forward into OS 4.7. Only time will tell if 5.0 brings relief.
Through the following sections I hope to convey to you both my excitement about how the Storm is a grand accomplishment, and also how disappointed I am that there is still so much to wish for.
I won’t say I’m any sort of smartphone expert, but I’ve had my fair share of experience (pleasant and otherwise) with various models over the years. I was an early Windows CE user dating back to the HP Jornada. I then migrated to a succession of iPaq models, and finally ended up with the venerable HTC 6700 Apache for a few years (I skipped the 6600). I then toyed with a few other HTC models, one being the 5800 (which was less functional than the 6700, so I disliked it) and the 6800 Titan which served me well for about 10 months or so.
Allow me to explain why I’m now reviewing a Blackberry instead of another Windows Mobile device: I have grown to hate Windows Mobile. My 6800 lasted me only 10 months because I simply couldn’t stand it anymore. The browser didn’t work with most sites using AJAX and was slower than frozen tree sap, A2DP sounded like a tin can, the whole thing froze if you didn’t pray to the application gods, sometimes it would spontaneously reboot, or it would just randomly decide to have some other petulant tantrum, usually involving making and receiving calls. I grew tired of dealing with it and, since I am a CDMA customer and had no intention of switching carriers, I went in search of something besides an iPhone. I found the Blackberry Storm, and though I was hesitant at first, I took the plunge and haven’t regretted it…much.
In the first five minutes of ownership I went from joy to terror – I installed the battery, and the device powered on for the first time; so as I waited, expecting the clouds to part and the heavens to sing, the little twirling busy icon danced. I couldn’t wait to see what the colors looked like on the magnificent screen, but before I could see them, I had to wait.
Upon purchasing the Blackberry Storm, I prepared myself to deal with fewer issues immediately. I ceremoniously un-installed all my WinMo tools (immediately freeing something like 10GB of storage space; add that to my list of reasons I migrated), and un-boxed my new device. Holding it in my hand, the size is just right – I’ve had many phones which were too small, too wide, etc… but this one feels just right sitting in my palm.
First real eye-opener: it doesn’t feel like any of my previous Blackberries in terms of heft and build quality. This was my first personal Blackberry, but I’ve had two work-related models before – a 7230 (lasted two days, hated the thing) and a 7130e (better, but still wasn’t close to being in love with it). Both of those phones felt as though I might break them in half whilst typing, though the larger 7230 was sturdier to some degree – but they both felt almost like hollow shells. Regardless, neither of them felt top-notch and left me wanting for a more robust device that didn’t creak and rattle so much. The Storm, by contrast, feels like a rock the second it comes out of the box. For its size, it is surprisingly weighty, but not detrimentally so – you won’t put on any muscle with it, but you’ll notice if it goes AWOL from your hip/purse/pocket. I can’t say that for my 7130e which would usually find itself sitting uselessly on my desk and not on my person.
The second thing I noticed was the fit and finish of the device – it is gorgeous. Not in the diamond-encrusted Swarovsky sense, though; it’s subtle, with a shiny black body, chrome trim and lettering, and body seams that you need calipers to measure. It doesn’t creak or rattle, it doesn’t budge or deform in my hand, and most importantly it still feels like I can call it a business device and not a portable showpiece. The buttons are sturdy, with the requisite call/blackberry/escape/end sequence at the bottom, and two sub-surface “soft” buttons along the curved top edge that control locking and silencing. Even the buttons that do stick out on the side feel truly part of the phone and not at all likely to break off – these are the camera and volume up/down buttons on the right side and one assignable key on the left above the new-fangled micro-USB port (more on that later).
On the rear, you’ll find two textural differences: for one, part of the backing is coated in a rubbery, non-slip texture that helps the phone to stay where you put it – I like that I can use it on a ferry ride and not find it on the floor after having set it down for a second. The battery door is not the same shiny black, though – it’s brushed aluminum, and so has a different look and feel that I think looks great; what’s more, it locks in more tightly and securely than counterparts on any other phone I’ve ever had. The door coloring is interrupted only by the same handsome chrome motif from the front, in the form of the RIM/Blackberry logo (also, in my case a matte silver Verizon logo), making for a very pretty device all around.
The true center of this device is most certainly it’s screen. Even when off, it is obvious that the images will be brilliant. It doesn’t scream plastic, and in fact it’s not: it’s glass, lending a further elegant cue to the already striking phone. One of the first things you notice about the screen is that it wiggles back and forth ever so slightly – that’s normal, so don’t worry. And as big as the screen is, don’t be fooled into thinking you’ve got 16:9, because it’s actually only 4:3 for movie-playing purposes.
The first time you turn on the phone and gaze at the screen, you’ll appreciate just how dazzling it really is. The reds are deep, the blues vibrant, and the greens mesmerizing. One of the first things I did was to play the sample video that came on the phone, the trailer for Babylon A.D. Two things happened: I didn’t shut my eyes for the duration of the video due to astonishment-induced coma, and after I scooped my jaw up off the floor I realized that I could hear all the music and sound effects perfectly – apparently, that little speakerphone makes for quite an accurate (and loud) center-channel! It actually took my breath away. I’ve played on an iPhone and an iPod Touch, but somehow I was blown away by this screen with just one viewing of a short clip. Perhaps it’s only in comparison to my wretched HTC devices that I appreciate the depth and beauty of this screen, but I cannot overstate how wonderful it looks.
To underscore this point, I’ll say this: on two recent Saturday mornings when I didn’t want to sleep but didn’t want to get out of bed, I have whipped out my Storm and fired up a movie and watched the entire thing start to finish. On my phone. Those of you with iPhones and iPod Touches and even iPod Classics may be rolling your eyes, but know that I have seriously loathed the idea of watching a film on a small device up until I experienced this phone. Even portable DVD players used to leave me strained and uncomfortable, with their poor-quality CCFL screens that leak more than a busted dam. On the Storm, I found satisfaction. Casino Royale and Kung Fu Panda were my two test films, and for the following reasons:
Panda is animated, and employs the use of bright contrasting colors as is the norm for a children’s movie; much of the film is “twitchy” action with fast, jumpy cartoon movements – a good test for video response, and the contrast gets a workout with the artificial blacks and blues in animation. While viewing Panda, I first noticed how fluid the film was; there was no clipping or jumpiness like I’d found on my prior HTC devices, and the clarity was as if were watching on a plasma screen. Infrequently, a few frames would get crushed together while the processor caught up, but I attribute that to all the applications I run in the background. While watching Casino, I found that the screen accurately rendered the complex lighting found in the film, and provided more than enough contrast to discern shadows during dim scenes. All in all, I felt at home watching a film on this brilliant screen, and I look forward to doing so again.
A final thought: many Storm owners have no doubt seen the infamous videos describing how resilient the screen is to being scratched. I can attest to it’s durability – I tried my best to scratch it with a key and failed. I’m impressed! The rest of the device doesn’t share those tendencies, however; the chrome still gets banged up if you’re not careful and the shiny black plastic will gladly show any imperfections. Also, you might want to keep a cleaning cloth handy, because as nice as the screen is, you’ll notice every fingerprint at a glance.
The Storm comes with a CCD-based 3.2MP camera with LED flash. I use mine as a flashlight, principally, but the camera does take noteworthy photos as well. The flash briefly fires for auto-focus as well, making your subjects wince and seem like they’re all in pain in every shot. At 3.2MP, the shots appear crisp and clear, with very little apparent noise (compared to most cell cameras I’ve seen) and excellent depth of focus, although it’s dreadfully slow. It also suffers from the all-too-common white balance deficiencies present in underpowered cameras, so the flash tends to wash out any semblance of normal color when used without adequate ambient lighting, but I’ve found that it corrects for the final product by and large pretty well. The zoom is horrid, though – 2X digital, so close in for best effect and those psuedo-macro shots. Oh, and enjoy the gesture-based control for the zoom.
Although the ISO is indicated, it’s erratic at best and useless at worst – I’ve had the phone for over a month and in only a single instance it read something other than 200 (it read 1000, and I’m not keen to believe it either); on a fancy toy like this, the camera should come with something approaching ISO adjustment. You can play with the white balance, JPEG granularity, image size, and color effects, but that’s about it. Nice additions: image stabilization and geo-tagging! I have yet to use GPS with my pictures, but it’s a nice feature.
Note to mobile and hand-held developers: if you want to include a camera, make sure it is a quick one – in this day and age, if I press the capture button and then have to give it 5 seconds to finish auto-focusing and capturing what I was pointing at, you’ve done something very wrong. Let me be clear: I expect the same performance from my pricey cell phone’s camera that I would get from your average $120 point-n-shoot, or better. If, for a quarter of the price of my fancy phone, I can go out and get a camera that takes photos at 4 times the resolution and upwards of five times faster, with more features and a better flash, why exactly are you including a camera on my new device at all? Get it right or leave it out! Yes, auto-focus is nice – but not when it takes more than a second; if you can’t get it done in that timeframe, it doesn’t belong on any camera I would use for real enjoyment.
One of the reasons I didn’t buy an iPhone: expandable storage. I find that the more portable my data, the more options I have when and/or if something ever goes wrong with my device. Send my data-laden iPhone back to Apple for repair? Right, I’ll just kiss my 32GB of pictures goodbye now.
The Storm supports SDHC, the “HC” standing for High Capacity. Unfortunately for the SD standard, “HC” is only in comparison to the original SD standard, and tops out at 32GB. None of this really matters, though, because so far you still can’t install applications to removable storage. RIM, are you listening? At least you have 1GB of internal memory to clog up with silly noise-making applications.
With the 8GB SDHC card the phone comes with, you’ve already got a decent amount of starting storage. I think few users will have a problem with it as you don’t often roll more than a few hundred megabytes onto a new device to start with, at least if you’re anything like me. With a 3.2MP camera, you’re not going to fill up the card very quickly, and even media hogs should be able to load up an appreciable number of albums or movies onto the card before entering dire straits. When 16GB SDHC cards emerge in microSD form factor sometime later this year, I think most users will find satisfaction in the amount of storage available to use as a media vault. The SDHC standard actually tops out at 32GB, though, so we may eventually get some real legroom out of this first edition Storm, assuming the second one supports SDXC with a 2TB ceiling. So far, rumor is that the Storm supports only Class 2 SDHC cards (2.0MB/s), so even though there are 8GB Class 6 cards (6.0MB/s) they will only perform at Class 2 speeds. I haven’t tested this, though, so enjoy your grain of salt.
When I think back to my school years, I remember having to rely on quarters to call home. Then there were pagers, and I still vividly remember the first time I used a cell phone. Now, it seems that even your kitchen sink has a radio of some kind in it. The Storm is no different, packing four different radios: CDMA/EVDO-A at 850/1900Mhz, GSM/GPRS/EDGE at 850/900/1800/1900Mhz, UMTS/HSPA at 2100Mhz, and good old Bluetooth 2.0+EDR. No WiFi, but the rumor mill has already started on the Storm 2, and supposedly that will incorporate various flavors of 802.11.
I’ll make one passing note about reception: I haven’t had any issues with the Storm – I’ve always been able to make a call when I needed to. This isn’t saying much, because I have Verizon service for a reason: where I live, work, and travel they provide hands down the best coverage available. GPS reception is also good, maintaining lock even through long tunnels and through terrain; I could ask for more frequent update intervals in most applications, but I’ll call that a software problem for now. I haven’t extensively tested the Bluetooth, but I haven’t had any pairing problems and audio quality is very good.
The phone auto-selects the best network if you elect to enable it on first boot. You can manually select which technology to use as well, thereby forcing the phone onto different provider networks. I’ve tried this a couple of times and it’s been seamless and quick. In the US, no UMTS/HSPA is available due to conflicting frequencies, so the best GSM data connection is still EDGE. EVDO works well, though, and I’ve found that when I have call coverage I have data coverage, so basically all the time. I still need to get with Verizon to figure out what the deal is with slow downloads, but I have a feeling it’s a software problem – my older HTC devices download via EVDO much faster than the Storm, and I think this is due to a still-evolving operating system from RIM.
For other more physical connection options you of course have a USB port. Not any USB port, mind you, but a fancy new micro-USB port – the one chosen by a league of mobile device manufacturers to sell more accessories become the new standard interface. Yes, you have to buy new cables; no, I haven’t heard a convincing argument for why. Suffice to say it’s great, in that it works just like the old port – it’s just smaller.
Most Blackberry owners will tell you that RIM likes to play name-the-newest-version; for any given platform, there are many builds of OS available, with whole communities dedicated to tracking and evaluating the latest and greatest. The Storm debuted on Verizon with OS 4.7, specifically 4.7.0.75. By all accounts, it was terrible. To be honest, the first thing I did when I got mine was upgrade it to 4.7.0.109, the stable “new release” at the time. I kept it that way for at least a week before getting bit by the upgrade bug. I’ve since toyed with many different revisions, including a hybrid of two different versions, and they’ve all had good and bad things about them. For whatever reason, either Verizon or RIM seem slow or reticent to release an officially-supported version which fixes many of the ongoing annoyances. Camera speed varies greatly from build to build, as does start-up time to a lesser extent. On some builds the device feels nice and snappy, and on others it’s a beast. Common to all of the builds, though, is the one thing that plagues all Blackberries: memory leaks.
When my phone first boots, I have roughly 32MB of free RAM. Run a few applications, view a few websites, look at a couple maps, and by that evening with no applications open I suddenly have 10MB free. This probably sounds familiar to a lot of Blackberry users, not just Storm owners. It’s one of the reasons I consider the software a failure. Memory leaks? We’re still trying to figure out the JVM after all this time, huh?
How many times have you had to reboot your Motorola Razr? I know people that didn’t think the Razr had a power button. I know the Storm does much more than your run-of-the-mill flip phone – but why must the reliability suffer so? Surely, through the many generations of successful embedded operating systems designed by legions of developers in the last 10 years, we have learned to address memory management.
I know RIM can do better. This is the first touchscreen Blackberry, and I’m sure there will be others. Hopefully, RIM will think about including a faster processor in the next offering (the existing MSM7600 is woefully unprepared for some of the tasks asked of it) – that should help some. RIM is also known to be deploying their latest code revision to the newest devices like the 9000 “Bold”: version 5.0 – perhaps that will trickle down and bring some much-needed help to Storms currently stuck running the staggeringly underwhelming 4.7.
Like any product these days, there are a host of accessories and accouterments both physical and installable that accompany the Storm. The various belt clips, holsters, hard cases, soft cases, screen protectors, and other whirly-gigs are everywhere and in every variety. Personally, I’m using a standard-issue Verizon side-holster that incorporates the wonderful magnetic auto-off feature. If you’re looking for a special case, there’s one out there for you I’m sure of it.
For software, RIM was kind enough to launch the Blackberry App Store in April. So far, it’s been a success, but I wouldn’t call it resounding. Pricing applications at a minimum of $2.99 (not including “free”) is not what I consider a smart idea – I think in an economy of scale, and in particular a potential economy of this scale as proved by Apple et al, the fair minimum should be $0.99: just enough to add up to real money for Apple and the developer, but minimal enough for the consumer to click happily through the EULAs. People do seem to be buying into the BB app store, though, so it will in the end take off in similar fashion – I imagine RIM will review it’s pricing policies at some point, but overall the genie is out of the bottle.
I have so far been impressed with the quality of applications I have encountered on the Storm. With a Windows Mobile device, you never quite knew what you were getting into when you installed a new application. Thankfully, developers seem to be designing elegant and (in most cases) lightweight and functional applications for the Storm, and I have had few encounters with applications that performed poorly and fewer still that looked hastily cobbled together. There are many communities dedicated to tracking the rise of Blackberry applications; try www.crackberry.com and www.berryreview.com. For others, you can find comprehensive sources via your favorite Google search.
This is, after all, a smartphone and a Blackberry. It does everything that a smartphone should do, and more. It is first and foremost a Blackberry, though, meaning that email utility is superb, as always, and the calendar is as useful as ever. BIS/BES service, together with a Gmail account, the Gmail application, Google Talk, and Google Sync, makes this device the most connected thing I’ve ever owned. It has your contacts, your emails, your maps, your internet access, your chats, your pictures and music and movies…it slices, it dices! For as much as I’ve harped on it, the Storm does just about everything, and it does it all pretty darn well. Your connected world is quite literally at your fingertips. I absolutely adore this phone, even with the memory leakage.
To be sure, there are hurdles to overcome; but RIM has shown that they are willing to break the mold and do something different – I trust that they will also learn to adjust to the different challenges that a purely touchscreen device presents, and for the love of tacos amp up the processor in the next revision for even more awesome.
Bottom line: For the first time, I feel truly free of my desk. There are some things that I will continue to rely on my desktop and laptop for, but all in all I am satisfied to a ridiculous degree with my Storm. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a personal or business device who is not satisfied with the alternatives.
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3 Comment
i like this phone. It aint no iphone killer though, I think that's silly. I got one off of gsmallover.com and they sent me the wrong one! but than i got it figured out and got the right one, good service. i think i'm going to get the new storm 2 though or maybe the samsung omnia hd. anyways it was good for the price.
i want to buy a blackberry storm, but want to know which model is very latest. and it will be available in Bangkok on Jan 1st? if yes, how much the price?
i like this phone.Blackberry Storm 9530 i have notice reasantly some of callars no. is not display some how i was change some thing in there but i don't remember can you please tale me what to do?by my email
Thanks in advance