A Storm-y Week
I’ve had the BlackBerry Storm a week yesterday, and I decided I would post what I thought about it now, as I didn’t want to post a hasty opinion after only having had it a day or so. I got it Monday the 24th during my lunch break. Bless FedEx for taking my note as a release for them to hide it on the porch. By hide, I mean leave right in front of the door. UPS at least puts it behind the flower pots or under the door mat. But that’s not the topic today. I opened the box and opened the phone, it was well packed and the black box with silver BlackBerry logo greeted me. Very simple, cleanly designed box.
I opened it and was impressed with the feel of the phone. It had a metal battery door, not the cheap plastic, and it felt very heavy, solid in my hands. I decided I would plug it in and charge it, and when I slapped the battery in, it came to life – SLOWLY. I later learned that BlackBerries (BB) tend to boot sorta slow. Both of my Treos booted pretty quick, but the BB was slow. Took about 4 or 5 minutes, but I attributed it to it being its initial boot. I later provisioned it on and activated it on Verizon’s network and I carried the now-defunct Treo to work in order to transfer stuff over.
I was impressed with the interface. BB software is ridiculous with all the options. There are soooo many! BB blows the Treo away – even though the Treo’s have a more open API and there are more third party programs. What the Treo does have the BB beat on is the SMS messaging, it groups them by recipient in the main list. BB will show a message string for one recipient when you open one from a particular person, but you can’t get the grouping except on BlackBerry Messenger – which is also handy for messaging other BB network users.
The phone hardware itself, I like. I’ve quickly learned the navigation, but it was a steep curve for me. I was not only switching phones, but switching to a whole new OS as well. Sort of like switching from a Windows PC to a Mac PC – but also changing to a different keyboard and mouse too. Having to relearn both things at the same time. The click screen took some getting used to. You have to select with your finger first, and it only works with a warm touch – no stylus or anything will select anything – which is good because then it won’t get stupid in your pocket. Then you have to physically press the screen down to choose your selection. It works well, but it’s a learning curve…haha. The Treo was just choose and go.
The phone is not without its bugs. The rumor mill online is that the software it was supposed to have was flawed, but VZW and BB wanted it released so they backed down to an earlier version, which was slower. So the phone at first was a pig – but coming from a Treo 755 (slow) and a 650 (quick) I wasn’t too disappointed. Being an early adopter of a new phone, I figured they’d release a new version of firm/software. And they are supposed to release a new version on 08 Dec. I got a leaked version of an interim software which worked very well. The leaked (purportedly authorized) software has made the phone operate very snappily. It’s much more responsive, and the accelerometer is much faster at determining whether to change the display from portrait to landscape. Program switches are also very fast, and it’s so nice to be able to actually multitask, something difficult if not impossible with the Palm software.
The internet is nice and speedy, maybe a little faster than the EVDO/EDGE/3G seemed to be on the 755. The 650 did not operate on that data network – it was slow as shit on a tin roof in Siberia. It’s fast enough on the EVDO network to actually be useful. BB also had AIM and Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, etc available for it. BB also has excellent email support, and it shows up within seconds of when I would get it on my computer when I was running my email client. The SureType is a little interesting to learn, as sometimes it seems to select words that don’t even exist. What the fuck? I mean – it works well, but there’s no way something like lzgyspow should even show up. It’s also a little time consume to change what it wants. It’s difficult to select text and even go in and change a letter or two in a word. I think an onscreen arrow pad or something would be nice. No idea how to address that.
Overall – I can safely say I wish I had gone BlackBerry before. I love the software, and even the software for my computer is great. It had an allowance to pull the data from my Treo right to the BB and I didn’t have to spend hours inputting contacts. What DOES suck is that there’s no desktop client to edit the records, so it’s on the phone or via Outlook. I hate Outlook.
I bought a case and a screen protector, since I paid full price to obtain the phone out of cycle. I also purchased insurance, since it was so expensive. I upgraded my voice plan and saved $5 (19% state plan discount) and I also got a 20% discount on the BlackBerry data plan – this saved me about $10 a month, so the insurance was almost a no-brainer. Better safe than sorry!
I now know why they can refer to them as Crackberries. 