RIM BlackBerry Storm 9500

RIM has never had a problem selling BlackBerries to people more interested in the serious business of mobile messaging than messing around with multimedia, but times are changing. It’s no secret that the consumer-friendly iPhone is also starting to catch the eye of business users, which is perhaps why Apple’s share of the ever-expanding smartphone market recently surpassed RIM’s for the first time.

Not that RIM is taking this licking lying down, of course, and the BlackBerry Storm is its attempt to beat Apple at its own game. And it really means business. Not only is the Storm unashamedly influenced by the iPhone’s design, it even does away with the one thing that made the BlackBerry famous in the first place – the keyboard.

The good news is that if the Storm is set to be an iPhone killer, it certainly looks the part. It’s stylish, is well-made from quality materials and generally feels like a high-quality, aspirational gadget – not unlike the recent BlackBerry Bold, in fact. And, of course, there’s no keyboard, which leaves its whole face free for a great big screen.

At 3.25in from corner to corner, the Storm’s screen is actually bit smaller than the iPhone’s (at 3.5in), but it has a marginally higher resolution – 480 x 360, rather than 480 x 320. It’s touch-sensitive too, which makes the Storm the first-ever BlackBerry you can operate with something other than a scroll wheel or trackball.

Since it’s capacitive (like the iPhone) rather than resistive (like Windows Mobile devices), the Storm’s screen should be smooth and snappy when scrolling and dragging pages, but ours was a bit laggy – something that a future firmware update will hopefully address. The translucent black user interface hasn’t changed much from its first appearance on the Bold and since it’s already been designed to work with a trackball, it should work pretty well with a touch-sensitive screen – but the BlackBerry Storm doesn’t have one…

Instead, RIM has opted to equip the Storm with what can only be described as a ‘click screen’. This works just like the capacitive screens on the iPhone and T-Mobile G1 for dragging and highlighting on-screen elements (lag aside), but to launch a program or open a web link, you actually have to press the screen until it responds with a tactile ‘click’ – just like the touch-pads on the new Apple MacBooks, in fact.

Physically clicking on-screen elements feels pretty intuitive once you’ve unlearned any existing smartphone habits, and it certainly makes more sense than the confusing tap/double-tap/tap-and-hold system used by Windows Mobile. But after initially warming to the Storm’s novel input method, its shortcomings soon became all too apparent.

Pressing the screen doesn’t cause the area under your finger to click (as early rumours about the Storm suggested), but instead it pushes the whole screen down by a millimetre or so until the mechanical switch that sits beneath it is triggered. There is, however, only one switch and it sits below the centre of the screen. This means that it’s impossible to click the screen in two places at once – or even in two places in rapid succession, since the switch mechanism takes a fraction of a second to ‘unclick’.

So, while it’s possible to tap away quite quickly on the iPhone’s on-screen keyboard, the Storm forces you to type at a more deliberate pace so that each screen-click registers successfully. And by “more deliberate” we mean “frustratingly slow” – not good for a smartphone whose name was made on the strength of its speedy text input.

Now we expect some people will actually like the clicky screen, so we won’t write-off the Storm for this complaint alone – and tap-to-click can easily be added with a software update (we’ll give it three months…). Unfortunately, awkward input is the least of the Storm’s problems and the next one is a real doozy – it doesn’t have Wi-Fi.

To omit Wi-Fi from a premium, do-it-all smartphone like the Storm seems pretty silly to us, but to omit it from a smartphone that’s designed to compete head-on with the iPhone is just plain stupid. The Storm does support HSDPA and we suspect RIM will make a case for 3G being a guaranteed high-speed internet connection, while Wi-Fi depends on an available hotspot, but 3G coverage is far from ubiquitous – and far from free. (And it is isn't much use when the operator blocks your SIM, which explains our lack of web browser screenshots – thanks Vodafone...)

This wouldn’t be an issue if the Storm was offered on a tariff with unlimited internet access, of course, but Vodafone seems to think that “unlimited” means “500Mb of downloads a month”. This is a fair use guideline rather than a hard limit, but it's one you could easily breach if you start downloading music from Vodafone's online store or use the Storm as a tethered 3G modem with a laptop (something that Vodafone permits).

If not for these issues, we’d actually quite like the Storm – at least we certainly don’t hate is as much as some reviewers seem to. Severe shutter lag renders the 3.2 megapixel camera useless, the auto-screen rotation takes an age to kick in and you’ll need a microSD card to make much use of the media playback functions (1Gb of onboard storage won’t go far), but the big-screen web browser is a pleasure to use and, of course, it’s still a BlackBerry in all the important ways.

So while the Roxio Media Manager desktop software is horrible and the device needs some firmware fixes, BlackBerry users who are tied to the platform should find some satisfaction in the Storm – as long as they can live with that clicky screen and lack of Wi-Fi. It falls far short of the iPhone experience though, and anyone looking for a seamless multimedia smartphone is still best-served by Apple.