BlackBerry Storm (Verizon Wireless)

Touchscreen and User Interface

Using what RIM calls SurePress technology, the Storm’s 3.3-inch touchscreen is unique. Other devices in this class offer just haptic buzzing. The Storm’s display physically clicks downward when you make a menu selection, click on a link, or type on the keyboard. It’s an ingenious idea, and we like how icons and keys light up before you press them to ensure you’re making the right selection. On the other hand, some may find this peace of mind more trouble than it’s worth, as clicking requires effort.

The display itself is bright and sharp, with a high resolution of 480 x 360 pixels. Web pages and videos exhibited a fine level of detail and rich colors. And we appreciated that the screen picked up less fingerprints than other touchscreen phones we’ve recently tested. One disappointment is the Storm’s accelerometer; while it rotates the display automatically from portrait to landscape mode when you flip the phone around, at times we noticed a delay of a few seconds. (Then again, the iPhone sometimes suffers from the same issue.)

The user interface is generally intuitive and pleasant, and we liked the nifty transitions when moving from the main menu to different applications. But we found that we had much better results when pointing at something on the screen to highlight it and then selecting it, as opposed to just stabbing at the device, as you would do on any other touchscreen phone.

Keyboard(s) on the BlackBerry Storm

Thanks to the SurePress display, typing feels surprisingly natural on the Storm, and messaging fiends have two choices when it comes to entering text. In Portrait mode, the Storm displays the SureType layout found on BlackBerry Pearls, which crams two letters on multiple keys. It’s best for typing with one hand, and we found it worked well, especially since RIM has improved its spelling suggestion system.

When you use the Storm in landscape mode you’ll see a full QWERTY keyboard. In this mode we could type accurately but only if we were relatively slow and deliberate when using our thumbs. Picking up speed drastically—as if typing on a BlackBerry Curve—reduced accuracy. More troubling is the fact that the keyboard got stuck a few times over a day’s use, where it would momentarily not register our presses.

We have one other nitpick: The keyboard gets in the way when entering text on a Web page or in applications like VZ Navigator. Swiping down on the screen is supposed to make the keyboard disappear, but this action doesn’t always take. We’d much prefer an OK or Done button to hide the QWERTY.