Storm presents a new experience. It is its own creature with its own personality and system of nuances and tricks for switching between applications and unfolding hidden options. Regardless of what smartphone you have used before, it will take several days to adjust to the Storm’s specific way of doing things.
There is no physical keyboard and very few buttons. In their place is a large, vibrant screen that can be activated by your fingertips at different levels of touch.
You can glide your fingertip across the surface of the screen to scroll through menus. The main home screen shows the first three rows of application icons, but by gliding your fingertip up the screen you can scroll the menu down to reveal the rows waiting below.
You can rest your fingertip against an icon for a moment and it will become highlighted. If you do this on a person’s contact in the messaging section, the program will sort the messages to display only those involving that contact.
When you want to activate an icon to open a program, you must physically push against the screen and, like a bubble or dimple, it will go down and you will feel it click, as if it were a button. The whole screen clicks though, not just the icon, but the Storm knows which application you’re activating because it can detect the touch of your finger as well.
With an e-mail or word document open you can select a body of text by placing one fingertip at the beginning of the text and another (your thumb for example) at the end. This will highlight the block of text and then you can select to copy and even paste the text from the Storm’s options menu.
The Storm has a built-in accelerometer which allows it to detect the position it is being held in and change the screen between landscape and portrait modes.
The virtual keyboard is one element that changes with the accelerometer. In landscape mode the keyboard stretches out comfortably to fill the width of the screen and offers a full QWERTY layout. In portrait mode, it squashes together across a smaller set of virtual keys in a layout similar to the keypad of the BlackBerry Perl. Both choices are available for writing e-mails and text messages.
The Storm is a slick, black phone with a screen that is as glossy and vibrant as the Bold’s. It has the same style of icons and colour scheme of the Bold, but a different menu layout. It is darkly elegant, masculine and comfortable in the hand.
The Storm will come equipped with most of the features offered by smartphones today; EV-DO data connection, Dual-mode functionality for both CDMA and GSM networks, built-in GPS with BlackBerry Maps and Google Maps, 3.2 Megapixel Camera, stereo bluetooth, 3.5 mm headphone jack, external speaker, and expandable memory through micro SD cards. The only major feature missing is a Wi-Fi connection.
It will take a few days of use before I can come to a conclusion about the Storm, there are still a few tricks to discover and work out, but it’s clear that for anyone looking to purchase the Storm the main issue will be the “ClickThrough” keyboard.
The Storm presents a new experience. It is its own creature with its own personality and system of nuances and tricks for switching between applications and unfolding hidden options. Regardless of what smartphone you have used before, it will take several days to adjust to the Storm’s specific way of doing things.
There is no physical keyboard and very few buttons. In their place is a large, vibrant screen that can be activated by your fingertips at different levels of touch.
You can glide your fingertip across the surface of the screen to scroll through menus. The main home screen shows the first three rows of application icons, but by gliding your fingertip up the screen you can scroll the menu down to reveal the rows waiting below.
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