BLACKBERRY’S STORM IS APPLE IPHONE’S BIGGEST RIVAL YET

When Apple iPhone emerged on the mass market, everyone was on tenterhooks on just how this sleek new toy from Apple was going to beat the rest of the competition with its features, and of course, with its signature Apple software and firmware. Even before the release, people were going wild about the fact that Safari was bundled with this particular Smartphone.

iPhone supremacy

There’s no doubt about it- with features that make other phones look amateurish, iPhone is now the new industry leader, beating back the rest of the large companies with its unbeatable 3G capabilities. Nokia, Symbian and the other players in the Smartphone arena are all trying to get a slice of the fast expanding market.

But it seems that a literal Storm is fast coming on the horizon. Verizon’s own ball in the game is promising to deliver not just one more feature, but many, many improvements to what iPhone can already deliver.
Let’s put the Storm to the test

One of Blackberry’s Storm’s most noticeable feature is the touch screen technology that Verizon integrated into the new phone, to contrast heavily with the ultra responsive screen of the iPhone.

The main difference is that you have to actually press on the screen to make an input. So let’s try to apply this to an ordinary situation with the Storm. Say you’re a professional and you want to create a document with Microsoft Word. You start typing, but you notice that you have to type the same way that you type with a laptop to get anything done.

This feature can be disorienting for former iPhone users, while some simply loved the technology, because you actually have to do something aside from touching the screen.

For professionals, the keyboard is absolutely vital in getting anything done. One of the problems of the predecessors of the iPhone and the Storm is that the QWERTY orientation of the keyboard was almost shoddily done, and you commit the same mistakes with keyboard over and over again. Because let’s face it: our fingers are not one centimeter across.

Images, videos and the Web

Just how efficient is the Storm in handling three of the usual activities of a multimedia phone user? For those who don’t know yet, Verizon’s Storm has higher resolution than Apple’s iPhone. The margin is close, but relevant enough to be felt: 3.2 megapixels of pure picture grabbing fun.

The Storm is video-capable, hurray! This was one particularly disappointing lack with the Apple iPhone, because everyone was expecting to shoot a few party videos with that 8 or 16 gigabyte storage space. But alas, to no avail. Maybe next time Apple would be kinder and install video capabilities as well.

As for the experiencing in accessing the Web, let it be known that the Storm also has full HTML support and allows you to view the website as they would look in any ordinary PC or notebook.

Unfortunately, Verizon’s new golden boy cannot connect via Wi-Fi. Disappointing and utterly saddening, but nonetheless, we can still play around with the other features while Verizon finally realizes this missing piece and puts it in, in the next installations of the Storm.