PICKING THE STORM OVER THE APPLE IPHONE

The Smartphone phenomenon has just begun, says enthusiastic mobile technology commentators, as the largest multinational companies unfurl their deadly Smartphone arsenal, battling with each other for market supremacy.

Apple’s entry into the Smartphone arena has just made things much more complicated for the “silent” giants, many of whom appear to have been caught off guard. When the glass surface of the Apple iPhone caught the first rays of sunlight, a new cult of Smartphone users simply loved the interface, and of course, the concept of having a phone and a computer at the same time.

Verizon, the company responsible for the Blackberry craze late in the nineties, was quick to respond to the Apple iPhone threat- The Storm was born to combat Apple’s own Smartphone.

Verizon stirs up The Storm

One of the basic features of Blackberry’s The Storm is the stereo Bluetooth; surprisingly, for all the “value added” features of the Apply iPhone, the stereo Bluetooth is missing. What gives, Apple?

Another strangeness about the Apple iPhone is the power source for the Smartphone; how come the battery doesn’t come off as easily as other mobile phones or even laptops? This might be fine if the Apple iPhone’s battery lasts as long as the Energizer bunny, but it doesn’t.

Going to a service center to have it replaced is just too much of a hassle to count as a good thing. Again, what gives, Apple? How come The Storm has an easily removable battery, for easy battery swapping when one battery fizzles out of action?

Space counts

Now, we’re not really into large memory for Smartphones, but nonetheless, the Apple iPhone is limited to 16 gigabytes of storage space. And that is already fixed, presently. The Storm has worked around this difficulty by accepting memory cards up to the same amount of memory, which gives this particular Smartphone an edge.

Do you see it now? If you can use 16 gigabyte memory cards for The Storm, you can buy two or five or ten of these memory cards thereby making your Smartphone infinitely flexible when it comes to storage.

Let’s look at photo and video options for both the phones. The Apple iPhone is limited to 2 megapixels (much like the SE K750i) and cannot be used to take videos. To the horror of many who have been used to shooting with their camera phones, the iPhone has no video recording features at all, compared to The Storm, which can, while sporting a sufficient 3.2 megapixels.

The question of multitasking

For those who are sore for the iPhone’s incapacity to become a mobile modem, AT&T says that it’s coming very, very soon. Though if you want the wireless capability now, Blackberry’s Storm already has the feature.

And finally, devices that run with Microsoft’s very own Windows Mobile are providing quite a wonderful time to users with expanded multitasking capacities. It’s never fun to close other programs when you want them running- which is the biggest challenge to Apple yet. What will you do with an iPhone that has so many applications, but you have to turn off one to get to the other?