Hands-On Look At the BlackBerry Storm 2

Barence writes "PC Pro has had time to play with the new BlackBerry Storm 2, and came away impressed. The new touch system garners the most praise, doing away with the mechanical click screen of the original Storm — the new screen gives a kind of localised haptic feedback which 'feels just like clicking a button.' The phone, announced today, also includes Wi-Fi, BlackBerry OS 5, and increased storage, so it's looking an enticing prospect. After the disappointment of the Palm Pre, could this be the smartphone to beat?"

Comments

LOL

[Captain Splendid]

After the disappointment of the Palm Pre, could this be the smartphone to beat?"

Um, yeah, let's not mention the elephant in the room, shall we?

Re:LOL

[thisnamestoolong]

I think it is understood in the reading that the iPhone is the smartphone to beat, it was very clear to me that they were referring to the promises made by Palm to unseat the iPhone from its iThrone around its release, and musing as to whether or not the Storm 2 has what it takes.

Re:LOL

[Shane112358]

The Palm Pre was certainly only a disappointment to those people who expected it to be the second coming of Jesus or to overtake the iPhone within months of release. I have a Pre and it is the best phone I have ever owned. The OS is top notch. The hardware isn't perfect but neither was the iPhone when it came out. As someone else said, the problem is that you need to compete with the ecology of Apple - not just the h/w or s/w. So even if all the small shortcomings of WebOS are addressed, and the next Pre has none of the h/w issues of the first, and it's very popular - it still doesn't mean that it will "kill" the iPhone. It will take a while - at least a year or so - for the iPhone to be dethroned by any competing architecture. It will happen, for sure. Whether it's one year or ten years from now is up to Apple, their competitors, and shear luck.

Re:LOL

[tomhudson]

You know what would be REALLY nice? If I could just swap phones as needed during the course of the day. For example - walking the dogs, or shopping, or driving - take a flip-phone. At the office? Move my "identity" into a smartphone. This way I don't have to decide between something small that fits in a pocket and won't break if I drop it, and something that has more functionality.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Monkey]

I state them as separate because the people I know with iPhones use them differently than other smart phone users. I have had some one hand me their iPhone with a map loaded to show me how to get to a restaurant, something normally done verbally or with a quick sketch. I know iPhone users who keep their complete photo collection on their phone, most people use the phone to hold snapshots only. A friend of mine uses his iPhone to watch movies, no other smart phone user I know keeps movies with him. The iPhone is, in my opinion, a portable media computer with phone functionality. The first real attempt to make a Tricorder prehaps, but the difference between an iPhone and the average smart phone is as great as the difference between the average smart phone and my moms cell phone without a camera.

Re:LOL

[vakuona]

Probably all possible. But that is not the point. The iPhone makes is something you would actually want to do on a phone for the first time. I have had phones that had some capabilities that were not on the original iPhone. 3G, check. Web browser that allowed flash, check. Java environment, check. The iPhone was the first to make these things usable enough without tearing my hair out. it's not enough to make something possible on a phone. That's easy. Non geeks _require_ ease of use.

"feels just like clicking a button"

[toppavak]

I was under the impression that the problem most users have with touchscreens isn't feedback after clicking, but before. I can touch-type on my blackberry, which lets me go a lot faster than on smooth touchscreens because I can tell my finger is on the right button by feel.

"Developers, Developers, Developers..."

[nweaver]

To quote MonkeyBoy, err, Steve Ballmer...

This is why the iPhone has become so entrenched, it has the developers. Its not just a matter of building hardware that matches Apple, you now have to build an ecology to match Apple.

Which is very hard: . Look at the MP3 player market. People have made plenty of players better than the iPod-of-the-time, but Apple has the ecology annd is now hard to displace.

If they want the storm2 to be more successful...

[damn_registrars]

... they need to release it on a more relevant network. Just because Verizon claims to have the most subscribers in the US doesn't mean its a relevant market for blackberry phones. In particular the fact that Verizon is still clinging to old network technology makes it a bit of a burden for phone deployment in corporate environments. GSM networks are head and shoulders above the Verizon network in speed of phone deployment.

If an employee drops their phone and needs to replace it ASAP, someone in the company can pull the SIM card, put it into a new phone, and the employee is back to work with minimal downtime - unless you're on a non-GSM carrier in which case you need to have the magic store deactivate the old phone, sell you a new phone, activate it, etc...

If RIM doesn't realize that their terrible choice of carrier (on an exclusive deal no less) was a big part of the lack of success in the first generation storm, then they need to have their heads examined. Release the new phone on a modern GSM network and we'll see how it really fares.

The important question...

[Linker3000]

Does it support IMAP/POP/SMTP natively or are you still stuck with the pile-of-crap BIS/BES services for email (or using Web interfaces or third party java apps)?

I won't even consider looking at this model for the rest of our small (16) corporate team unless we can use our own (postfix-based) mail servers. The fact that we have to hand over our email account usernames and passwords AND pay just so the Vodafone BIS server can pick up mail and kindly pass it on to the Blackberries (and vice versa) is simply crap, a security risk and a PITA if a user changes their password via our mail server's Web interface.

That is why I have an HTC Rhodium (Touch Pro 2)!

Re:The important question...

[LordLimecat]

Just because BES doesnt support your environment doesnt make it a piece of crap. BIS isnt really meant to be a real solution for businesses anyways. Stop using the wrong product for the wrong thing. Get an exchange / domino / groupwise server and BES, or stop complaining that they dont work properly.

Rolling disappointment

[Maury Markowitz]

> After the disappointment of the Palm Pre, could this be the smartphone to beat?

Does everyone already forget that the Pre was going to be the one to beat after the disappointment of the Storm? Clearly the Pre 2 will be the one to beat after the disappointment of the

There's nothing wrong with the Pre, and the "disappointment" has little to do with the phone. The disappointment is that it didn't stop the iPhone from clobbering them in the market in spite of the hue and cry from the haters and fanbois alike. If you define your disappointment by the lack of relative sales, then my guess is that this is going to be a disappointment too.

It's not about the phone, it's about what you can get onto the phone quickly and easily. Anyone that's Midomi'd a song while walking past a bar patio and then instantly downloaded it from iTunes knows what I mean. Consumers get this, and it seems only the self-declared "experts" who are missing this forest.

Maury

Re:Disappointment of the Palm Pre?

[Linker3000]

It amuses me when users that opt for technology with a fair degree of vendor lock-in, feature control (or plain, simple pose/fanboi value) 'look forward' to features that the rest of us have had for years.

I have an HTC Rhodium (Touch Pro 2) and HTC have done a good job to hide the abomination that is Windows Mobile with a fairly decent (but not perfect) touch interface, wireless works, I have VNC, PockeTTY and Remote Desktop support loaded (for 'emergency support'), I am about to load up a VoIP app (SJPhone) and I can browse networks & print. TomTom satnav's on and I have just installed a Spanish-English dictionary for a holiday next week. The developer community (eg: xda-developer) is very strong so there are lots of commercial, free and shareware tools and apps available and, well, it's a decent phone too!

Re:If they want the storm2 to be more successful..

[seanmeister]

You can bash VZW's CDMA network all you want, but as long as they keep giving me 4 bars of EVDO goodness out here in the desert in rural southwestern New Mexico, they'll get nothing but love from me :)

Re:Disappointment of the Palm Pre?

[s.o.terica]

Fundamentally the Pre and webOS have always been brilliant, second only to the iPhone in many ways and superior in a few (brilliant multitasking interface, brilliant unobtrusive notifications interface, gesture area below screen, keyboard, universal SMS/chat threads, TeleNav navigation included with plan, etc.). It also has a development platform with, for most developers, the shortest learning curve (using HTML/JavaScript for all the local apps).

The only things that have ever been an issue with the Pre were a few bugs (not show-stopping, mostly related to bluetooth and the like), almost all of which they've fixed by webOS 1.2; and the battery life, which seems to also have been somewhat mitigated by newer OS versions. The Pre as it stands now is a rock-solid platform, with very arguably better messaging capabilities than either the iPhone or the Storm for anyone who doesn't explicitly need Blackberry Enterprise Server compatibility (Pre works flawlessly with Exchange).

BB Storm on the other hand is glued to an antiquated OS that has had successive layers of cruft grafted onto it to modernize it (evidenced nowhere more than the fact that a touchscreen phone still essentially has an on-screen pointer, with the click action being separate from the touch action). Worse, it's much more of a bear from a developer standpoint.

Re:What the hell mods?

[Publikwerks]

And of course this gets modded down too. Hey mods, blow me

Rush???

[brennanw]

Einsturzende Neubauten, Minor Threat, Sex Pistols, Subhumans, Throbbing Gristle, Big Black...