After weeks of rumour, Vodafone has officially announced the Blackberry Storm (also confusingly known as the 9500, 9530 and Thunder) will be available to order Friday 7th November.
So what is the Blackberry Storm and how does it measure up to previous versions of the Blackberry? Well the most obvious difference is that Blackberry have now joined the touchscreen club, this widely seen as Blackberry manufacturers RIM’s response to the success and popularity of the Apple’s iPhone interface.
The Storm features a 3.25? high-resolution screen, bursting with over 65,000 colours, including widescreen providing crystal clear clarity. The touch interface is superb and unlike any other touchscreen device on the market, this is a unique interface developed by Blackberry, each touch of the screen feels very similar to using real buttons with a sharp clicking sound, furthermore the double click confirmation of each action will go far to resolve the sensitivity issues raised with other touchscreen devices.
On the usability front the Storm features three different styles of keyboard, SureType predictive, Multi-tap in portrait for quick use, or simply turn the phone sideways and use the on-screen QWERTY keyboard to txt or reply to emails.
So what else does the Blackberry Storm have to tempt the loyal Blackberry Pearl users out there. Memory, 1GB built in expandable to 16GB using a memory card. The 1GB should be sufficient for documents and around 250 tunes, whereas 16GB is plenty for your mobile office and over 4000 tunes.
As you would expect email access is the heartbeat of the Blackberry devices, access your email accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft Exchange, Live and Outlook, downloading attachments is a breeze, JPEG, Adobe, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The Storm also offers live chat across platforms such as MSN Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, AOL Messenger and ICQ.
Superfast 3G Internet, access your favourite websites such as Google, BBC, Facebook, YouTube and Ebay. Built in GPS and Blackberry Maps, locate yourself faster than ever and get directions.
Blackberry have finally improved their camera feature, often criticised as lacking quality in previous models,
the Blackberry Storm comes with a 3.2 Megapixel camera with Auto Flash and Digital zoom, not as special as other camera phones but more than adequate and compliments the Storm’s armour of features. You can also capture video, quality is good, photos and videos viewed via Blackberry’s Media Sync player and easy to
share with family friends via email or upload to Flickr.
Synchronisation with your PC remains straightforward, sync address book, calendar and tasks, you can also
transfer your iTunes music files. Connectivity options include Bluetooth Stereo Audio providing high quality wireless sound, talk or listen to music on the move.
All the above encased in a perfectly formed design, weighing just 155g with the battery. Will this be enough to surpass the iPhones popularity, well its certainly a great attempt and will no doubt get a huge thumbs up from Blackberry’s loyal following. Its won me over, I think the Blackberry Pearl sitting on my desk will be redundant come 7th November.
According to loose lipped Vodafone officials and Mobile TopSoft, 2009’s first iPhone killer the Palm Pre will be an exclusive to their network upon its release.
