BlackBerry Storm: iPhone's worthy foe

OK, so do we finally have an iPhone killer, now that the BlackBerry Storm from Verizon Wireless is out?

Killer? No. Worthy opponent? Yes.

In the less-than-24-hours that I've had the device and have been able to do a basic set of tests on the BlackBerry Storm (on sale Friday, Nov. 21, for $199.99 after $50 mail-in rebate and two-year agreement), I can say that people who abhor the Apple iPhone will be able to grab a Storm and go, "Nyah Nyah Nyah" to their fellow iPhone owners. But I don't expect that large mobs of iPhone owners will suddenly switch gears to the Storm, either (they can't, they still have their own two-year contracts). But the Apple Haters now have a horse in the race – the Storm does an admirable job of matching several of the iPhone's features and provides some features that the iPhone doesn't have.

Full disclosure: I own an iPhone 3G and have loved the device for my personal and business communications. So coming into a review of the BlackBerry Storm, I'm inevitably going to compare it to the iPhone. I have tested several BlackBerry devices over the years, but have never officially owned one for business purposes.

Touch Screen and Keypad
The TV ads promoting the Storm have at least one thing right – this is unlike any other BlackBerry that you've ever seen. Anyone expecting to see the hardware-based QWERTY keyboard and trackball navigation will notice that those are gone. In its place is a glass touch screen, the largest touch screen ever on a BlackBerry (with 480 by 360 pixel resolution). The iPhone's screen is slightly larger, but only slightly.

The touch screen on the Storm adds another feature that the iPhone lacks. You can tap on the screen with your finger to highlight an icon or item you'd like to activate, but to fully activate the icon or button, you have to press hard on the glass and feel the "click". People in favor of the clickable nature of this tactile feedback argue that you become more accurate in your finger presses, but I'm not completely sold. In my opinion, this just means an extra step in the process. You can tap on the screen and highlight a button or icon, for example, but it won't be activated until you press down on the screen. On the iPhone, when you tap on the icon it activates it. While I eventually got used to the Storm's way of doing things, the additional effort of pressing down on the display was disconcerting, to say the least.

Because there's no keypad on the Storm, the device relies on three types of on-screen keypads for things like typing out e-mails and text messages. When the Storm is in portrait mode (vertical alignment), users can choose between the SureType keyboard or a multi-tap keyboard. The SureType keypad should be familiar to BlackBerry Pearl owners – it's the keypad that utilizes two letters per "key", and uses an intelligent database to predict the words that you're trying to type. The multi-tap keyboard should be familiar to cell phone users, it's the traditional, three letters per key for input, requiring the "tap-tap-tap" approach for typing letters like C, F, etc. The third keyboard is a fuller QWERTY style, but this only occurs when you rotate the device into landscape mode (horizontal alignment). This gives you a one-letter-per-key keyboard, and this keyboard takes up about half the screen, and the keys are slightly smaller than the ones in the SureType or multi-tap keyboards.

When using the keyboards and in selecting menu items, the accuracy of my finger presses were not as impressive as I'd hoped. Especially when typing letters on the far edges (such as a Q, W or A on the left), the finger tap didn't line up. There didn't appear to be any way to calibrate the screen to try and get it more accurate, so this was frustrating. I have to say that for touch-screen navigation, I still prefer the iPhone method. Typing messages by pressing hard on each keyboard got exhausting after a while.

Web browser
The HTML Web browser on the Storm is an improvement on other BlackBerry browsers, but falls a bit short of the Safari browser on the iPhone 3G. You can zoom in on Web pages with the BlackBerry browser, but you do this by double-tapping in an area that you want to zoom to, unlike the iPhone, in which you use two fingers to zoom in and out.

Data Access
The major difference between the Storm and the iPhone 3G is the WANs available for data access. The Storm utilizes Verizon's EV-DO Rev. A network, while iPhone accesses AT&T's 3G (HSDPA) network. With previous devices that I've tried, EV-DO access speeds have been consistently higher than HSDPA. In general, Rev. A offers download speeds between 450Kbps and 800Kbps. Because the Storm is also a "world phone", it can access the UMTS/HSPA (2100MHz) and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks in different countries.

I tried to do some typical browsing tests with the device to get a sense of the download speeds, but the BlackBerry browser utilizes proxy servers and other functions (such as data paths that go through the RIM NOC) that don't give a fairly accurate measure of download speeds and bandwidth (which I learned when I tested the BlackBerry Bold device). Relying on estimates and anecdotal evidence, then, I noticed that the browsing speeds were decent over the EV-DO connection.

As I've written before, I'm disappointed in the lack of a Wi-Fi connection on the Storm. Some may argue that 3G networks preclude the need for a 3G connection, but as I've discovered with the iPhone, data access over Wi-Fi tends to drain the battery less than over 3G, and the Wi-Fi download speeds tend to be faster than 3G as well. Several readers of this blog have agreed – they feel that no Wi-Fi on the Storm is a deal-breaker.

Messaging options
Like all other BlackBerries, the Storm supports personal (up to 10 accounts) and corporate e-mail. The Storm also includes SMS and instant messaging (Windows Live, Yahoo!, Google Talk, AOL Instant Messenger and BlackBerry Messenger). The inclusion of picture messaging (MMS) is a big plus with the Storm, as it's not supported on the iPhone. If your main purpose for having a mobile device is communications, you won't be disappointed with your messaging options on the Storm.

Applications
Verizon and RIM have done a good job at adding additional applications to the device to go head-to-head with the iPhone. Applications included the VZ Navigator GPS/driving direction app; Visual Voice mail; a media player (music, video, photo viewer and voice notes); a clock; 3.2 megapixel digital camera (with video recording feature, another thing the iPhone doesn't have); and a couple of games (BrickBreaker and Word Mole). A separate "Applications" folder included access to Flickr; Facebook; a "Maps" application (not as good as the VZ Navigator service); MemoPad; Tasks; Calculator; and three DataViz applications (Word to Go, Sheet To Go and Slideshow To Go), which are valuable to business users who want to read and edit Office documents on the device.

The 3.2 megapixel camera offers higher resolution than the 2 megapixel camera on the iPhone, and the 2x zoom and flash offer more options for taking photos than the iPhone. When sending photos via MMS, the larger photos default to VGA resolution (640 by 480). Camera options include automatic flash, image stabilization, automatic white balancing and even geo-tagging.

The music player and video player are good applications, just like the ones on the BlackBerry Bold device. Music and videos can be loaded onto the device via the microSD/SDHC card slot, which requires that you open the battery case (but, thankfully, you don't have to remove the battery). Speaking of the battery, it's removable, something the iPhone doesn't allow. I didn't have enough time to monitor battery drain, but I went from a full charge down to about 85% during about 8 hours of on-and-off testing.

Bottom line
There are a lot of other features on the Storm that I probably didn't mention, and will likely follow up as I get a chance to test it more. Also, you'll likely see some commentary from others on this site who will point out more reasons why the Storm should be your new smart phone (I'm particularly thinking that Mitchell Ashley will loooooove it). For heavy messaging users, the clickable touch screen may end up being the thing that drives them away (in this case, they can still go to the Bold or other older BlackBerry models), rather than the lack of Wi-Fi or any other features.

But as I said earlier, the Apple Haters now have a horse in the race, as do the AT&T Haters (and Verizon fans). On your marks, get set, go!