Blackberry Storm Updates

The Blackberry Storm has a number of great features and a great design.  One of the best features of the Storm is its input system.  Research in Motion, the company behind the Storm, chose to completely remove the physical keyboard and, instead, use a touch screen.  This makes the Storm very similar to the iPhone in terms of input, but the phone is considerably different and, in some opinions, better than Apple’s new gadget.

To navigate the Storm, you move your finger around the touch screen.  This sounds simple, but it actually is a very different way of entering commands, and it takes people a few minutes to get used to it.  To move the selection, you slide your finger across the screen; to select something, you press down.  The problem with many touch screens, though, is that they sometimes read movement as pressing down, causing things to be selected that you didn’t want.  However, the Storm actually uses a series of small switches placed beneath the touch display.  This results in many fewer “accidental” selections.

This series of switches is very obvious when using the on-screen keyboard and creates a feeling of actually typing.  Many who have had the opportunity to try out demo versions of the Storm have remarked that it is much easier to type on it than it is on the iPhone or any other touch screen.  Another very cool feature is the way the keyboard changes – hold the phone horizontally and it appears as a full keyboard, but if you turn it vertically, it shifts to a SureType configuration very similar to that on the Blackberry Pearl.

On the downside, the Storm doesn’t enlarge or shrink the screen like the iPhone does; however, you can more easily cut and paste by moving your finger around the text you want to move, scroll up and down with a single flick, and very easily select items on the screen.  In fact, it’s pretty obvious what Research in Motion had in mind with the Storm: they didn’t build the phone with the intention of outdoing the iPhone.  Instead, they built it with the idea of making a great mobile device for those who needed to access documents and email while on the go.  In that light, the Storm is a solid success.  It combines Blackberry’s legacy of creating devices for mobile executives with many of the new innovations introduced with the iPhone.  Will these mobile executives enjoy using the touch screen over their physical keyboards, though?  From everything we’ve seen, the ease and efficiency with which the Storm’s touch screen works will wow them all.

(image from mobilegazette.com)