Storm hits phone market

BlackBerry Storm

RIM has attempted to give BlackBerry users a touch-screen alternative without leaving them feeling frustrated by their keyboard. It provides a unique click technology called SurePress, which allows users to click the screen down like a mouse button. Thus, no matter how many times a users' fingers touch the screen, nothing happens until they push the screen all the way down, like a mouse click.

With its sleek, stylish design and chromed frame, the BlackBerry Storm offers a large 3.25-inch touch screen with 480 x 360 resolution, or 184 pixels per inch, delivering sharp, bright colors. Its HVGA screen seems to work well for movies and browsing.

The device, which is 1.39cm thick, is equipped with a silver bezel running around the sides, top and bottom. On top of the phone, there is a single LED to the right and the lock and mute keys. Below the screen, there are four familiar BlackBerry keys including phone, menu, back and end/power. On the left side is a convenience key and a micro USB port, while on the right is a volume rocker and a 3.5-millimetre headphone jack.

On the back, the battery cover is made from a solid piece of brushed aluminium, and the camera and flash sit atop the plate, covered by a glossy plastic strip.

The BlackBerry Storm supports a wide range of lifestyle and business applications. It offers three types of keypads: a standard "multitap", a "SureType" and a full Qwerty keyboard.

It is one of the better looking phones on the market, giving users up to 10 supported personal and work e-mail addresses. It also offers polyphonic and MP3 ring-tones, allowing users to make theirs different from the rest of the crowd.

It has a full HTML browser that works in either portrait or landscape orientation and supports mobile video streaming from sites such as YouTube (mobile.youtube.com) and other mobile entertainment portals.

With a powerful media player, the device can play movies smoothly in full-screen mode and can quickly display pictures and slideshows. It can manage an entire music collection and playlists can be created directly on the handset.

Moreover, instant message (IM) applications available on BlackBerry Storm include Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and BlackBerry Messenger.

Users can enjoy taking photos and recording video with the smartphone's 3.2-megapixel camera, which has variable zoom, auto focus and a powerful flash that provides continuous lighting when recording video.

The BlackBerry Storm comes with 1GB of onboard storage and a micro SD/SDHC memory card slot that supports up to 16GB of additional storage per card.

Other features are Bluetooth and build-in GPS, but unfortunately it does not have WiFi function. So users have to make their Internet connections via GRPS, EDGE or 3G (when the latter becomes available).