Myhphone – Mobile Phone Info Center

The original BlackBerry Storm that launched since November last year become a disaster for the company because of it clumsy touchscreen experience. We all know that the BlackBerry smartphones is the pioneer  in Qwerty keypad phone, but when it come with the touchscreen phone, RIM seem fail to manipulate the skill.  However, RIM is not going to give up, they are come back with the new touchscreen smartphone, namely BlackBerry Storm 9520 which is said  revamped the touchscreen technology which is come with a new, intuitive text input options that to prove it capabilities to make a decent touchscreen. Would it be true? Let’s check it out.

Design

The BalckBerry Storm 2 is still have the exactly same design as it predecessor, but with  5g heavier.  The front was covered by the 3.25 inches touchscreen that have 480 x 360 pixels of resolutions. The buttons below the screen are four regular control keys – call, menu, return and terminate(End). They are all touch sensitive too. Overall, even the Storm 2 is identical with it predecessor, but it does look sleeker, with a more rounded design and comfortable to hold in hand.

Touchscreen and Virtual Qwerty

The Storm2 is using a new touch technology that called Surepress technology. It is indeed faster for typing, The Qwerty virtual keyboard a also has a good physical feel. It has a features that when you touch a key, you can see that is your selected letter before committing it with a click. This really rise the accuracy on the keyboard. Besides, you also can click more than one letter at once with the screen depressed, just like on the pc keyboard for you to hold down the shift key to enter several upper-case letters. This multi-touch also can be used on the Storm2 to zoom in and out of images. By compare with the orignal Strom, you can clearly see that the Storm2 has improved a lot on the touchscreen technology, though it might not up to iPhone level.

Music and Video

The music player on the Storm 2 is pretty basic. Like most of the music player, the Strom 2 allow you to sort tracks by Artist, Album and Genre and support  MP3, WMA and AAC files. The UI of the music player is simple, there are nothing more than necessary information displayed on the screen. On each song you play, you can only see the Play, Stop, Song List, Previous and Next keys on the bottom of the panel.  By pressing and hold on the Artist name, you will activate the search on all the song of that artist. It is a nice features to quick find an artist songs that in hundreds of songs in the phone.  As for the video playback, likewise the video player that included is also pretty simple like its music player. The player supporting MP4, 3gp, H.264 and WMV video files. The video quality are superb,  we’re quite surprise that the display have the quality like AMOLED, since it is not equipped with it.

Application

The Storm 2 comes pre-loaded with a number of applications, however we will talk about few notable apps only. As a business dedicated phone, pseudo-Office options is all you need view and edit Word and Excel documents on the go. Besides of that, IM also important communicate with others, therefor RIM give a bunch of IM applications that includes MSN messenger, Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and even  ICQ. And when dealing with social networking, unfortunately it is only come with it own Facebook application. The Facebook apps has a quite nice interface where you can send messages, check pokes and messages and also look at your news feed, so basic facebooking is no problem at all.

In Short

The BlackBerry Storm 2 obviously is way better than it predecessor. Most of the problem that found on original Storm has been fixed on the successor. The touchscreen now responds better and WiFi also included. However, the identical design of both phone is not a good move because it is not really stand out as a compelling device for Storm 2. In a nutshell, the BlackBerry Storm 2 is not the best but definitely won’t be the crappy touchscreen smartphone anymore.