How excited was I about the Blackberry Storm? To put it plainly. A LOT. And when my poor little Pearl’s pearl took a turn for the worse and could no longer scroll down I jumped at the chance to make the switch over. For those of you who bother reading my crap you are well familiar with my overly exhuberant love of all things Blackberry. I am like a rabid Apple fanatic when it comes to my Crackers. I even attempted a switch to the iPhone for a bit, but ended up going back to my former lover like a beaten wife.
I received my new Storm last Monday and prompty set it up. It has the shiny new Blackberry 4.6 OS with all those shiny little icons and a few cool features, the best is the ability to read HTML mail (finally). The handset itself it comparable in size to the iPhone and sports that shiny black laquer look of an 80s style cocaine sniffing table. It isn’t a bad looking phone. You would be hard pressed to even tell the difference from the iphone in most light.
Now onto the actual experience…
The painful, heartwrenching, awful experience.
The God forsaken garbage ass non-responsive touch screen.
When I had initially tried out a friends Storm I was sort of impressed with the way the touch screen clicked. It was such a difference from the non feeling of the iphone. But after having used , or attempted to use, the touch screen for an entire week I have come to the conclusion that it is absolutely crap. It is like trying to type on a keyboard with a piece of gum stuck on your finger. Because of this bad responsiveness doing anything one handed is virtually impossible. And that just sucks.
The other issue that I have to take with the Storm is the fact that it can’t seem to figure out the difference between portrait and landscape very well. It literally takes 5+ seconds for it to recognise the shift and sometimes I have sat here shaking it before it adjusts.
The rest of the phone is pretty standard Blackberry so I can’t really complain on that front. The 4.6 OS seems to be an improvement, but I’ve been so frustrated trying to get anything else to work that I can’t say for sure.
The final outcome of all this complaining?
I gave myself 7 days to see if I could overcome these difficulties.
I gave up.
I bought a Blackberry 8220 – which is essentially the Pearl in a flipform. Looks pretty cool to me and I loved my Pearls so let’s hope this works out.
