The BlackBerry Storm 9500

Design

A Fatter Version Of The iPhone

Riding on the coat-tails of the popular Apple iPhone, RIM has unveiled its answer to the ultimate iPhone competitor. Like its other fruity rival, the Storm dumps the traditional numeric keypad in favor of a relatively large touch screen for typing and navigation. Apart from four buttons sitting on the bottom of the phone, the front of the device is mostly occupied by a 3.25-inch capacitive touch-screen.

The large touch-screen supports a high resolution 480 x 360 pixels color display. Whilte testing, we observed that the Storm also has good viewing angles, allowing us to watch videos or view images on the screen clearly even when the phone is tilted at 45-degree angles. Though the screen is not as vibrant as its Bold sibling, we feel that the Storm's screen still gives many other touchscreen handhelds a run for their money. Also on a related note, with the Storm's built-in accelerometer, the screen automatically flips from portrait to landscape mode to facilitate typing emails and browsing the Web much easier.

What's different between the iPhone and the Storm is the tactical feedback that the Storm provides every time you select an icon on the screen - that's because the whole screen of the Storm acts as one big button which has to be depressed to make a selection/action. So it's not quite like the tactile feedback you would be expecting from actual keys or that of haptic feedback systems. We'll discuss more on this later.

Borrowing the genes of its slim sibling, the BlackBerry Curve, the Storm also sports the same slim and sleek body. This means that it will fit nicely into any jeans pocket. Though attractive, the Storm lacks the sex-appeal that the iPhone has, and it is slightly thicker and heavier at 155 grams. That said, we have to admit that the Storm looks much slicker than other touchscreen devices like the HTC Dream and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1. Note that its glossy black surface is also a magnet for fingerprints and smudges, and we found ourselves religiously wiping the phone against our jeans.

On the right profile of the device where the volume keys are located, you'll also find a 3.5mm headphone jack (hooray for audio enthusiasts!).