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

[mvdwege]

It will indeed take some time to beat Nokia.

Mart

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

[Anonymous Monkey]

Yeah, let's not talk about Android. Actualy the way I cut up phone users by what they do with their phone:

1) Cell Phones: people who make calls and take some pictures (aka my mom and dad)

2) Cell Phones with Keyboards, text heavy IM users who make calls, (aka me, my wife, ect).

3) Smart Phones: Appointments, e-mail, text msgs, perhaps twiter, and phone calls (My boss and his blackberry buddies)

4) The iPhone: People who mostly use internet access and send messages.

And on a related note, I was out for pizza the other night and counted over 10 iPhones. The reason they were so easy to spot was that people who had them were face to the phone and not talking for most of the night. Once it was the joke that Nerds would prefer to IM than talk, but in the collage/partying side of the restaurant it was all nose to phone, and in the back their was a Magic the Gathering group that was laughing and talking and interacting with each-other. Perhaps the next joke will be that every one likes IM and txt better, but nerds are trying to be all smart practice using their vocabulary and talk face to face.

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.

Blackberry would be more compelling

[swb]

If there was more direct data in/out to the device, versus "securely" routing everything through RIM. That model seems like it makes sense in a 1999 way, but now it just makes it awkward to use them outside of a BES environment.

The iPhone may be a closed platform, but at least data I/O isn't forced through Apple's servers.

"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.

Re:"feels just like clicking a button"

[Anonymusing]

I am so used to the iPhone "keyboard" now that I can essentially touch-type. Sometimes I fat-finger it and hit the wrong key, but the correction feature is pretty good about that. I'm not saying the iPhone is better or worse than other smartphones; merely, it's what I have now, and the typing does not feel much different than when I had a Blackberry.

FWIW, I type roughly 85 words a minute on a full-size keyboard (with 95% accuracy).

Re:"feels just like clicking a button"

[bluesky74656]

I think there's something to the fact that the iPhone's auto-correction is more suited to a touchscreen than the Blackberry's. I've found that while the Blackberry's spell-check is very good for people who sometimes make spelling errors, the iPhone's is much better about fixing fat-finger syndrome.

I would almost be tempted to say that the iPhone's spell-check puts more weight on where keys are located, while the Blackberry's is more of a straight dictionary search

"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.

Re:"Developers, Developers, Developers..."

[mafian911]

I agree completely. To me, the blackberry is a bit of a relic. They can dress up blackberry's with new tech and a fancy new OS, but I have to say, the developer experience remains horrible. I'm surprised that Blackberry still has the reputation it has, to be honest. They may have been the first "cool" smartphone, but they can't ride that wave forever. If they want to continue to be a player in the smartphone market, they may need to reconsider their content strategy. I suppose they can survive by holding their place as the "corporate phone". Corporations don't need content for their employees. They don't need data plans. They may be able to hang on in the "boring" smartphone space for a while, no doubt... Windows Mobile will be there only competitor there. As for unseating iPhone... no chance. Not with their content model. It won't touch Android either, in my opinion.

Re:"Developers, Developers, Developers..."

[7-Vodka]

Oh yeah, Apple is so entrenched in the smartphone market they're almost a monopoly!!11!!

data

Re:Disappointment of the Palm Pre?

[giverson]

Yeah, I don't get that. I absolutely love my Pre. And to answer your question, Exchange syncing works great.

Palm Pre

[bbroerman]

To me, the only disappointment in the Palm Pre is SPRINT!

The Disappointment of the Palm Pre

[brennanw]

... I know exactly what you're talking about! After buying my Pre, I found that:

  - I didn't immediately lose weight
  - I still had to wear glasses
  - the damage to my hearing (after 20 years of listening to good music) wasn't repaired
  - my credit limit wasn't raised, and my day-to-day living expenses weren't reduced

Sure, overall it's a great phone, as far as portable phones that store important information, take pictures, play music and access the internet go, but those four points stick in my craw. Fail!

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.

As a former Storm owner

[m0s3m8n]

As a former Storm owner I think RIM has gone a long way to fixing several of the idiotic design choices (compromises) in the Storm Mk1. I never had a problem with the click screen after applying some recommended fixes. I hope the build quality had been improved as I went through 4 phones before giving up. Probably the biggest issue I had with the phone (as a smartphone) was the terrible memory management. Blackberry, while they advertize several gigs of internal storage, use a small dedicated memory pool for the OS, program storage, and data (email) storage. On the original that was 128 MB. Just turning the phone on dropped that to 50 MB usable and after loading several apps, it would drop to 10-20. At that level the phone became very sluggish. And the OS have a propensity to leak memory so that as the day went on your usable memory level would continue to fall to the point where you had to pull the battery to reset the phone.

Re:As a former Storm owner

[bluesky74656]

And the OS have a propensity to leak memory so that as the day went on your usable memory level would continue to fall to the point where you had to pull the battery to reset the phone.

My Storm seems to have a feature that automatically resets the phone at random intervals. It handily solves that problem, but can be annoying when you're actually trying to do something with it.

Seriously, though, the sluggishness of the phone is a big drawback. If it could keep up with how fast I type and not randomly reset I would be very happy with it.

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)!

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.

On VZW do I want the Storm 2 or Android?

[edmicman]

Serious question - I'm a dumbphone user finally wanting to move to a smartphone, and in the next couple of months. I have to (read: want to) stay on Verizon, and don't want a Windows Mobile phone. I've decided on either the Storm2 or the upcoming Android phones, but am not sure which to go with.

Essentially what I want is a phone that I can email/message/facebook/twitter/do tasks/organize my life with. I want to be able to browse the web, but I don't see myself spending lots of time doing that; usually I see it just looking up something quick. I also don't see myself as a big apps/games user, but then again having never had that experience I don't know - maybe I would if the opportunity were there.

From what I can tell, my impressions are:
BB pros:
better build quality
good (best?) messaging/email ability (I don't really know, but figured that was their background so it must be very good?)
relatively proven track record for phones like this

BB cons:
lack of webkit browser (aren't they supposed to be working on this? when? would the S2 get it eventually?)
generally "closed" system
I have the perception there's less consumer app development for BB than with other platforms

Android pros:
webkit browser
open system
app development seems to have more potential, especially with consumer apps

Android cons:
how is the messaging? Does it work well?
still young...although that doesn't bother me that much
from what I have seen of the VZW leaks, the form factors don't seem as nice as the BB.

Having experience with neither, I don't really know if I have a preference between hard or soft keyboards.

Thoughts or advice?

Re:On VZW do I want the Storm 2 or Android?

[Voyager529]

despite the HTC Touch Pro2 running WinMo, you won't know it unless you intentionally go there. VZW already has a Winmo 6.5 update, and the XDA chefs are great as always. I had an older WinMo phone and I absolutely, unquestionably understand your aversion to the platform. But unless your concerns are philosophical (i.e. ABM), go give it a look. Seriously. I had an iPhone and couldn't believe I had tortured myself with one for as long as I had. A co-worker of mine owned a Curve and a Storm. He played with mine for all of 90 seconds and said "does Verizon have it?" (I've got the T-Mo version). He had one the next week and couldn't be happier.

And I'm not employed by any company involved, nor am I a $PLATFORM fanboi. The TP2 is simply the best phone that I have ever owned.

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...