Last Storm post for the week, I swear!*
Here are some recent photos I took with the Storm. Did I mention it does black and white?
Not too shabby, not too shabby at all.
*Unless VZ pushes the .76 update out Friday and it’s made of pure awesome.
Don’t forget, you can now view all of my photos either on my Flickr stream or in the photos section of my site.
I’m sure by now you have read reviews of the Storm. Most of them bad. Do you know why?
These reviews, like David Pogue’s and Stephen Fry’s (and most of the others) were written by people that have been using the Apple Telephone Product for more than a year. That would be like you driving a MINI for 200K miles and then reviewing Nissan Versa (the $9,950 model) after driving it for 10 minutes on the dealers test-drive loop. Apples to Oranges? Oh, you bet.
So how about some words from me? I have not used either an iPhone or a BlackBerry before. Just a normal guy that wanted a cool phone. And, I am pretty sure that this is the first review of this device by a person (me) that doesn’t own an iPhone or a BlackBerry already.
And I think it’s pretty cool. But it’s not without it’s faults.
First off, as expected, call quality is outstanding. Possibly the best phone, call-quality-wise, that I have ever used. It also helps that I am on Verizon in Southern California, which has better quality that any of the other providers, at least in the areas I travel most.
Next, again as expected, email and messaging is a pretty good experience. Easy to set up, easy to figure out and simple to use. But, it is a BlackBerry, and that is what they are known for.
Now, lets get to the other stuff. The things that, up until about 2 years ago, would have never been found on a phone. Like the 3.2MP camera that takes pretty kick-ass photos. There is the video too, which is remarkably good for a telephone.
It also has a built in media player. For audio it is truly amazing. Playing 256KB MP3s from Amazon sound fantastic either through headphones or in my car. Even the built in speaker isn’t horrible. It’s not good by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s passable to be sure. It also has full video playback cabability that I think is also pretty good. I say pretty good because playback quality and sound are great. Navigation and overall operability, however, leave quite a bit to be desired.
When playing video, you are stuck with landscape mode, and only if the screen is tilted in the right direction. Unlike every other part of the phone, the accelerometer appears to not work when playing video. And forget about the controls like fast forward or fast reverse. If you can get them to come up at all, the lag is so severe that you will actually think the phone has crashed. Once it actually did on me and I had to pull the battery.
Imagine if you will a video box below. That is where my short video review of the phone was going to go. But then I started reading the internets. Oh my.
Crackberry.com actually has a link to the updated software, .75, for the Storm that cures many of the issues with the accelerometer, among others. The even posted a video to show the differences. I only wish I could get it.
Then, I look over to BGR and they already have the next rev, .76. According to their report it actually improves things over .75.
Since I don’t want to install the BlackBerry stuff in Windows because my Windows is running like crap, looks like I’m waiting for OTA updates. After the updates come in, watch for a complete review.
If you have any questions about the device, let us know below.
A few more notes about the BlackBerry Storm. So it’s known, I am totally diggin’ this phone.
- In the box BlackBerry included power adapters for Europe, UK and Japan (or airplanes, not sure). Nice.
- Also in the box were a set of crappy ear buds that have a microphone on them. I might find something better. And a USB cable to hook to my computer. Yes it charges.
- The SurePress works pretty well. It’s a bit slower to respond than I would like but there are settings I can tweak for that. Being a touch screen guy I can say that it is exactly like a capacitive resistive panel. Touch to highlight, press to select.
- The media player is pretty sweet. I loaded up some songs I bought from Amazon and a few episodes of Top Gear. Audio playback is awesome! Dare I say better than my iPod Nano. Video playback is slightly jerky on fast moving things (hands clapping for example) but not so bad that’s it bothers you.
- It has a 1/8″ headphone jack. This is new to me since most other VZ media phones have that useless 1/16″ headphone jack (or whatever size it is).
- The accelerometer is a bit slow to rotate the screen. And it gets confused if you are holding the phone in your lap. I’m hoping a software update cures this.
- Sync’ing with the mac has been problematic. I’ve been trying PocketMac and so far it’s only been able to sync once. I’m going to try one more uninstall/reinstall before I pony up for Missing Sync.
- Call quality is great!
- Email/messaging is awesome. I’m sure not as elegant as the ATP, but I think it’s pretty good.
- Applications install easily. I only have a few so far. Waiting for QiK and a decent twitter client. Twitterberry is ok, but it doesn’t understand that the screen can go landscape.
- Battery life seems to be epic. Fully charged last night, watched a bit of top gear and listened to a few songs, plus left it on all night and I was only down 1 bar of battery life. Pretty sure this phone will go all day and then some on a charge.
Questions? Something you want to know? leave a comment below!
Not the greatest, but not teh suck either I don’t think.
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