Hands-on with the RIM BlackBerry Storm 9550

After the dramatic misfire that was the BlackBerry Storm 9500 , it comes as no surprise to learn that RIM is working on a superior sequel — or at least we hope that’s the case. The Storm 9550 — aka ‘Storm 2’ — has yet to be officially acknowledged, but a video has appeared online that seems to show a new model being put through its paces.

The video, apparently shot by the lead singer of Crash Test Dummies (just watch it to see what we mean) shows a handset that looks superficially identical to the old BlackBerry Storm, 9500 but that’s no bad thing — the design was one of the things that RIM got right first time round. There a few minor cosmetic changes, though — rubber buttons have replaced plastic ones on each side and the four front buttons are now illuminated — and one major one.

More info and the full video after the cut.

The big improvement  that RIM has made with the BlackBerry Storm 9550 is the touch-screen. As you may recall, the first model had a dreadful ‘SurePress’ display that had to be forcibly pressed to ‘click’ — the whole screen was mounted upon a mechanical switch. Thankfully, RIM has reverted to a standard touch-screen for the Storm 9550 and while the video reviewer doesn’t mention it, we presume this will use the same capacitive technology as the original model (and the iPhone).

The pre-production handset shown in the video is not feature complete and is running an old version of the BlackBerry OS, but the reviewer does say that it feels much more responsive — this could be down to a faster processor, of course. The handset also has 2Gb of memory and a memory card slot, so it’s clear that RIM will still be stressing the Storm 2’s suitability to multimedia.

The rumour is that the BlackBerry Storm 9550 will be a ‘world’ phone that supports both GSM and CDMA, along with HSDPA and EV-DO for 3G-speeds in both Europe and the US. There’s still no word on Wi-Fi, but we can’t see RIM being dumb enough to miss it out a second time…

[Via CrackBerry]