We had a bit of a rocky ride with the Blackberry 9500, but as with every good Storm you have to ride it out. And that’s exactly what we’ve done. It’s been a long year, but finally the wait has been rewarded, with the BlackBerry Storm 2. Batten down the hatches and stock up supplies because the 9520’s got a lot to prove.
After a disappointing start into the realms of touchscreen Research In Motion are back to try and win us over a second time round. The BlackBerry 9520 is the next generation of Storm handsets, and there’s no hiding that fact. The designs are pretty much identical; the newest handset in the Storm vein still has the annoying finger prone front screen, which honestly believes its sole purpose in life is to attract as many marks as possible. Most of the real estate’s taken up by the smudge friendly 3.25inch touchscreen with the exception of four keys at the bottom. The buttons, if you can call them that are more like an extension of the screen and use the same Surepress technology, giving the Storm 2 a very sophisticated appearance. The simple design, and sleek appearance has BlackBerry written all over it, and even though it has got a bit of weight behind it, the extra millimetres only give the impression that it’s a sturdy, reliable handset.
Despite the negative reviews, BlackBerry decided to give the Surepress technology another go, just aw well seeing as it won an award. It’s unlike anything else that’s on the market and provides a completely unique touchscreen experience. To say they’ve made a few improvements would be an understatement they’ve given Surepress a complete overhaul. Instead of having one ‘clickable’ sensor underneath the screen, it now has four making navigation a lot smoother and more responsive. The actual click sensation itself is very strange to begin with, it’s as if there is something burrowing into your fingertips (in the nicest possible way) every time you press the screen. But, as with everything after a while you get used to it and forget all about the nibbling sensation. Once you’ve got your head round clicking a touchscreen you’ll wonder how you ever used a standard display.
Delve inside the Storm 2 and you’re greeted with BlackBerry OS. On the surface it looks pretty attractive and is easy to navigate, dig a little deeper and you’ll come face to face with dated menus and tiny text, which makes navigation a hellish task unless your fingers resemble twiglets. The unsophisticated menus were a major downfall in the original Storm, so why not change them? But, considering the menus in question only rear their ugly head once you burrow into the smaller sub-menus, it’s not something you’ll have to face regularly. Something you will need to navigate on a daily basis is the homepage. It’s very simple and fairly attractive with large shortcut buttons to the most useful applications. There’s a hardware key to jump straight to the advanced menu, hold it down and a shortcut feature to your favourite apps will pop up, it seems a little unnecessary but gives you plenty of ways to access each feature. A welcome enhancement is the accelerometer function. Unlike it’s predecessor the BlackBerry Storm 2’s screen auto-rotates with next to no lag, turning the screen also throws you to… yep you’ve guessed it, the menu screen.
Moving over to the message side of things, you’ve got all the standard BlackBerry message options, as well as the addition of threaded messaging. It’s pretty standard smartphone inventory, but it’s something BlackBerry users have been crying out for. Writing messages on the full screen QWERTY is possible the easiest typing task you will ever experience. Because of the Surepress technology you have to put a little weight behind each depression to get the letters, meaning unlike your average mobile where the lightest touch will bring up a mix of letters, mistakes are kept to a minimum. There’s more than enough room to type quickly and accurately both in portrait and landscape modes and the Storm 2 has lovely large keys for the chubbiest of fingers. Better still the auto correct function is able to correct most things that’s thrown at it. The QWERTY and messaging functions on the BlackBerry Storm 2 are a world apart from the original…good news all round!
The 3megapixel camera’s nothing to shout about, nor can it be ignored. In Smartphone terms it’s not great but for the average mobile phone user it’s a good enough snapper to grab images on the go. The LED flash does it no end of favours allowing snap happiness to continue throughout the night.
The Storm 2 is the BlackBerry all rounder, for business users it’s got a comprehensive organiser, document editor and BlackBerry maps. For the general consumer its got endless messaging services, great for BlackBerry-to-BlackBerry contact. The MP3 player’s simple to use and with 2GB onboard storage there’s plenty of space to save any multimedia content, if not you can always add more.
Blackberry has made major improvements since the last Storm instalment and it’s paid off, the Storm 2 is without doubt, at the head of the BlackBerry collection.
