The Storm is coming and a few lucky gadget lovers have had their chance to get some one on one time with BlackBerry’s first ever touchscreen device. With a launch coming in a matter of weeks for Verizon Wireless, the Storm’s real world performance has been a bit of mystery and confusion especially when it comes to the click-able screen. Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan put it best by saying,
No matter how many times your fingers dance on the screen like you’ve been trained on every other touchscreen, nothing will happen. At least, not until you push the screen all the way down and you feel a click. Yes, the screen is a giant button, one you have to punch for basically every action, even every letter you type, completely breaking the touchscreen paradigm. Surprisingly, it works.
It seems that RIM has delivered in the area of touchscreen precision when it comes to typing. Honestly there would be very little room for error when you take an email messaging power house and attempt to rid the device of its physical keyboard. The bigger question for the BlackBerry Storm is how well it will fare against the dominant force in the touchscreen marketplace, the iPhone 3G. Danny Dumas from Wired summarized this best in his hands-on review by saying,
It’s hard to say if the Storm will eclipse the iPhone in terms of performance, applications, or even cultural cache. Despite having some superior features, I doubt it will have the same impact on the cellular landscape that the iPhone has.
There’s no ambiguity to button presses. … I was able to compose a lengthy detailed SMS without a single typo. That’s a feat I have yet to accomplish with the iPhone.
The last hands-on review so far has come from Engadget’s Paul Miller. Unlike Matt Buchanan from Gizmodo and Danny Dumas of Wired, Miller was not so impressed by the Storm, but did comment that RIM’s transition to touch has been “brilliant”.
What it’s probably going to boil down to is whether or not the BlackBerry OS is your style. RIM hasn’t done an overhaul to make touchscreen viable, instead banking on its navigation / execution paradigm to make the transition to touch — which for the most part it does brilliantly
The bottom line is that the BlackBerry Storm has done a good job impressing some of the most notable tech enthusiasts in the industry. When Gizmodo, Wired and Engadget all give you the thumbs up, you have clearly proven that you can deliver a device worth of gadget aficionados alike. The success of the BlackBerry Storm is very much in question, but with a BlackBerry Developer Conference coming to northern California later this month and some leaked photos of the Application Center, the future is bright. The Storm is coming people, it is coming.
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