Latest Mobile Phone Review And Price

The new BlackBerry Storm is probably RIM’s most important phone release since the first Pearl became available back in 2006. Why? Because like the Pearl, which introduced the business orientated BlackBerry brand to the consumer world, the Storm represents another first for RIM, the introduction of a touchscreen handset with a brand new interface ready to take on the current smartphone darling, Apple’s iPhone 3G.

Industrial design

The Storm is a striking device. From the second you lay eyes on it, it’s clear that a lot of time and care went into crafting this phone. The majority of the front panel is display, a large 3.25-inch (480 x 360) touchscreen sitting just shy of flush with a silver bezel that runs around the sides, top, and bottom of the device. The bands seem to be plastic, not metal, and trace the outline of the moderately thick (0.55-inch) phone, looping around the back, while the rest of the surface is a high gloss, piano black plastic.
All New Touchscreen Experience
.Research in Motion was unlikely to follow the herd and just add a regular touchscreen to their first ever device to feature such an item, but we didn’t expect something as unique as this! Touted as a ‘clickable’ touchscreen, it’s supposed to feel like you’re actually pressing a physical button rather than an unresponsive glass screen when using the Storm, which RIM claim makes the experience far more interactive and user-friendly than expected.

Will the Storm be the first re-invention of the touchscreen? We can’t wait to find out!Two Keyboard Options.Unlike the iPhone 3G’s portrait keyboard, the Storm offers two different ways of typing your emails, SMS’s or chat sessions. If the Storm is held upright as normal, then a SureType keypad is displayed, just like the one found on the Pearl, but if you rotate the phone into landscape orientation then a full QWERTY keyboard appears for faster and even more accurate typing! This is surely the biggest advantage the Storm has over its competitors.
Auto Screen Rotation.
This transfer between SureType keypad and full keyboard when the phone is rotated is fully automatic thanks to the accelerometer inside the Storm. It works well for web browsing and videos too.

Software
As we said, 4.7 isn’t a huge step up over 4.6, but there are a number of improvements worth mentioning. Navigating through menus and the home screen is still very much a typical BlackBerry experience though. The phone has two levels of “application” screens, the initial landing screen, which gives you eight app icons of your choosing, and a deeper level which displays all of your folders and programs. You can use the touchscreen to hover (or select) each of the icons, giving it that blue glow, but we found it annoying that you couldn’t drag your finger across the selections and have the glow follow you (as it does when typing). It gets stuck on the first thing you touch, and you have to re-press to move to another icon — it seems like it would be more convenient to have the selection follow your movements, but the phone doesn’t seem to know the difference between a quick flick up or down and a selection. You click down on the screen to launch an app or make a selection in a list, and you can swipe up and down to move through the list of apps, though it’s not nearly as smooth as it should be.
Camera / GPS / Battery life
In general, picture quality was excellent on the camera, which offers a healthy 3.2-megapixel resolution. The only problem we had — and it was a big one — was the fact that it took ages to focus and snap a shot. There were numerous times when trying to photograph something that we lost the shot because of the length of time it took the camera to kick in. In broad daylight, things fared a slight bit better, but when using the flash, it was pretty hard to get good results. This seems like something that could take a simple software tweak to fix — we know the camera looks nice, we just need it to take photos faster. A lot faster.