Blackberry Storm 9530 Review

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.