The Blackberry Storm is getting a lot of criticism around the web. The most notable is the rant by David Pogue over at the New York Times. His story titled “No Keyboard? And You Call This a BlackBerry?” is so filled with frustration, anger and disappointment that I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor PR managers at Research in Motion. I can highly recommend reading it.
Here is one of many videos showing an iPhone and Blackberry Storm showdown. This one compares load times of a new websites on both devices in real time. Unfortunately for RIM the iPhone wins this one too.
RIm has announced their iPhone killer recently. They call it the “BlackBerry Storm” and it is supposed the be their answer to the Apple iPhone.
It looks more like a direct reply actually. A reply that quotes most of the original message too and doesn’t add much. Do you know those replies? You write a long, funny and intelligent story and anxiously await a reply only to get your whole message back with one sentence at the top?
That is what the Blackberry Storm is like.
Even worse: the online demo looks and feels terribly low tech. The “Typing and Email” demo is supposed to show me how cool and fast text entry is on the Blackberry Storm. We recorded what it looks like here so you can get look too:
32.4 for the Blackberry Storm VS 22.3 on the iPhone! Ugh!
You could argue that this is ‘just’ a demo and the real product will be much cooler, but isn’t that a bit weird? Take a look at the movies for the iPhone. Like this one. High production values, terrible slick and amazingly cool. If you manage to ignore the slick sales guy.
Maybe the demo just sucks on a Mac and works a lot better on a PC but how much sense would that make? If you are going to compete with the iPhone you better make sure your demos work well on the Mac as I’m sure a very large part of iPhone users also own Macs.
Well no, RIM is not interested in any Mac users, at all. You can Sync your desktop iTunes® music files using BlackBerry® Media Sync, unless you have a Mac. It only works with Windows, as explained in Fine Print bullet number 9.
I have been a loyal Crackberry user for years. I used, abused, trashed and lost more than 10 Blackberries since I started using them in 2003. I was just as excited about the Blackberry Pearl and Blackberry Curve when they came out as I am about the iPhone. The Blackberry Storm however is ‘too little, too late’ for me.
Okay, one thing is cool: “At 3.2 megapixels, you can take sharp, print-quality pictures using the BlackBerry Storm smartphone. You can also rely on the auto focus and auto flash to help you capture the moment”. Just don’t forget to buy a few microSD cards because the only has 1GB of internal memory.
Written on 29th November 2008
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