RIM’s latest touch-screen smartphone put through its paces
Research in Motion (RIM) recently launched updates to its main corporate emailer devices, the Bold and the Storm. As I’m a BlackBerry user anyway, I’ve been putting both devices through their paces to see which, if either, is worth upgrading to.
I’ve already reviewed the Bold 9700, now it’s the turn of the latest version of RIM’s touchscreen model, the Storm2 9550.
The Storm2 adds Wi-Fi support to the touchscreen BlackBerry model, and offers 256MB of Flash memory, 2GB of storage and a microSD slot supporting Flash cards up to 16GB. It is noticeably larger and heavier than the new Bold 9700, and is more on a par in size and weight with the older Bold 9000. It also mimics the look of a standard BlackBerry, with half the screen taken up by two rows of icons, where you’d normally expect to see a keypad.
According to RIM’s specs, the Storm2 is 112.5x62x14mm, and weighs in at 160g, almost 40g heavier than the new Bold, the price you pay for a touchscreen BlackBerry. As a comparison, although the Apple iPhone’s dimensions are similar at 115.5x62x12mm, it weighs in at only 135g.
I tested out the original Storm about a year ago, and the verdict at that time was that the RIM touch-screen took some getting used to. I found pressing slightly to the left of the keys helped avoid errors when typing.
However, between testing the two Storm models I’ve got used to the Apple touch-screen experience having switched from a standard iPod to the Touch version, and in comparison the BlackBerry touch-screen comes out second best.
Where the iPod Touch requires a light touch of the virtual keys, RIM has kept with the ’click’ feature when pressing down on the screen, which mimics the feel of a physical button. So I found myself having to press down quite hard on the screen to type or access applications, especially compared to the Apple device, and quite often having to give a second press to access the application, or accidentally opening the wrong application or typing the wrong character through hitting the wrong key.
