My Blackberry Storm Experience

I’ve been a happy user of the Blackberry Curve for a good year or so now. But recently I was tempted to “upgrade” to the new Blackberry Storm that Vodafone started shipping last week.

The Storm arrived on Wednesday and initially I was quite impressed. It certainly looks very stylish and the screen has a very good resolution.

It’s nice to have support for HTML emails but what I was mainly interested in though was this “tactile feedback” from the touchscreen that Vodafone had been raving about.

Essentially the whole screen is one big button – it’s like there’s a micro-switch behind it. So you highlight something on screen by touching it and you then click on the highlighted item by pushing the screen. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it works. Unless you’ve got fat fingers like me that is. It’s very annoying trying to press one of the buttons at the very edge of the screen – ie, the Q or P on the keyboard. It’s also very easy to mis-type. I’m sure with enough practice I’d get the hang of it.

The killer for me though was the web browser. It’s awful. On virtually every page I visited the web browser seems to be zoomed out. You can zoom in by tapping the screen though. So this means when you are trying to click a link, you end up just zooming in on it. We have a web-based support ticket system for KashFlow and using it was a nightmare.

So I guess you can guess my final verdict. If you want a Blackberry Storm, go and bid on mine on eBay (it looks like I should make a decent profit from it – they’re going for upwards of £500).