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

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!

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.

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:"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