BlackBerry Storm 9500

It's not everyday that you see a BlackBerry review on our homepage but it's not like RIM routinely churn out devices like the Storm either. Messaging is still the legendary name but… well… touchscreen is the game. Keeping the business appeal of its siblings, the 9500 Storm sure stands out in the Berry crowd. But it also tries to set itself apart from the other touchscreens by promising a whole new touch experience.

The Canadian manufacturer RIM is walking an unbeaten path by adding unique clickability to the fluid precision of the capacitive touchscreen technology. The award-winning SurePress screen may not be everyone's cup of coffee but we're not talking teacup either, just yet.

Key features: 3.25" 65K-color capacitive touchscreen of 360 x 480 pixel resolution A new touchscreen experience thanks to SurePress screen Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 2100 MHz 3G with HSDPA support 3.15 MP autofocus camera, LED flash BlackBerry OS 4.7 624 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM Built-in GPS and BlackBerry maps preloaded 1 GB internal storage Hot-swappable microSD card slot, ships with an 8GB card Landscape virtual QWERTY keyboard goes as close to hardware keys as we have seen Great build quality Solid looks 3.5mm standard audio jack Bluetooth and USB v2.0 Really nice web browser Document editor Excellent audio quality

Now, this isn't one of those all-about-email BlackBerry reviews where the 9500 Storm gets only compared to its own kind, for the lack of meaningful competition. We are more than confident that the Storm does its BlackBerry thing just fine, so instead of focusing on it we'll try to give a different view of the device. Our objective is to see how it fares against all those other "regular" touchscreens that have the crowd's attention: Apples, Renoirs, Omnias, Diamonds and the likes.

Well, our approach may seem like comparing apples to oranges but only at first sight. The first thing about the Storm 9500 is the attempt to reach beyond the core group of diehard BlackBerry users. We're talking stealing some market here, so if Blackberry are playing to win, they should well be ready to take some hard beating too. First-rate email is nice and all, but the Storm will only be as good as its user interface and multimedia. For the rest (which means WLAN too) there's Curve and Bold.

Some treats in the box BlackBerry Storm 9500 comes in a retail package worthy of its price tag and high standing. Besides the phone itself the nice looking box holds an 8GB microSD card, microUSB cable and a DC charger that can take both American and European voltage. All you have to do is slide in the appropriate plug.

The Storm also comes with a nice leather carrying pouch and a cloth for polishing its shiny face. A handsfree is also included but it's one-piece, so alternative earphones on the same remote is not an option. Finally, you get a CD with some arguably useful PC software and the usual paperwork.

Design and construction We won't get tired of saying that you just cannot be too creative designing a touch-operated handset. Indeed the BlackBerry Storm 9500 is quite similar to most other touchscreen handsets out there but for the few extra pounds around the waist.

The extra few millimeters of thickness give the lovable chubby a rather distinct personality, resulting in a profile pretty different to, say, LG KC910 Renoir. The glossy plastic on the face and the metallic rear cover do look nice but the front gets covered in smudges and loses much of its appeal in almost no time.

Quite understandably the most of the Storm's front panel is taken by the 3.25" touchscreen display. The most important feature of the handset has its reserved spot a while later in our review.

The other elements of interest at the front are the call and end keys, the menu and back key as well as the earpiece and the loudspeaker grill at the top. There is also a LED status indicator at the top. The keys are large and tactile, and generally render no obstacles to usability.

The left side of the BlackBerry Storm 9500 hosts the microUSB port that is also used for charging, as well as one of the convenience keys. By default its functionality is set to starting the voice dialing but you can change that if you prefer otherwise.

The other convenience key is on the right of the handset, below the volume keys and the 3.5mm standard audio jack.

The top of the BlackBerry Storm 9500 hides two keys - one for locking the display and the other for muting the phone. At first sight you might miss those two controls as the surface looks smooth and save for the two small icons there is no way you can tell there are keys underneath.

The backside is where the 3.2 megapixel camera lens is located. A LED flash is built-in but, as usual, it fails to make a big difference.

The other noteworthy element at the back is the loudspeaker. Located just below the nice metallic battery cover it hides under a pretty robust - in mobile phone terms - grill.

The battery cover itself is removed by squeezing the two release latches. Underneath lays the memory card slot, which luckily is hot-swappable. You will have to remove the cover every time you want to replace it but at least you won't need to turn the phone on and off. And you have our word here - powering the BlackBerry Storm up does take bloody ages.

Another good news is that the Storm can easily handle 16GB microSD cards which is the largest capacity currently available on the market. Furthermore the handset managed to scan the contents of a 16GB card quicker in a few seconds, which is just amazing.

The Li-Ion battery itself is pretty promising with a capacity of 1400 mAh. It is enough to get you through two days of hardly giving the phone a break or four days of mild usage and that's a really good achievement however you look at it.

We have no reason whatsoever to complain about the build quality of the Storm 9500. All the parts seem durable and sturdy enough, and the phone is built to last, keeping looks intact in the long run.

As we already told you, the BlackBerry Storm 9500 is a pleasure to handle never mind its hefty size and weight. It fills your palm much more than a Samsung M8800 Pixon or an LG KC910 Renoir and the solid feel is quite similar to what you get from the overweight Nokia Arte handsets. The whole display of BlackBerry Storm 9500 is one giant button, which you press to confirm your selection. In addition, the display uses the capacitive technology for a very smooth and responsive touch action.

This gives you the chance to make a selection without confirming it and only press the display when you are sure the item is the one you want. In some parts of the user interface this proves to be a very welcome benefit, reducing your mistakes to the minimum.

Some might argue that this two-step selection slows you down but on most occasions they will be wrong. There are of course some cases where having to press this giant button takes its toll but those are not that frequent.

A certain issue of the display is that it's not seated firmly in place like it doesn't fit its frame (quite strange, we know) and it tangibly slips sideways leaving large crevices, which will inevitable start to fill up with dirt and dust.

While this side-sliding thing was no real obstacle to usability at this stage, the side wobble gives a somewhat cheap feel that you wouldn't expect of a handset in this price range. They simply could have cut the frame to match the screen dimensions more precisely.

Despite that flaw, the guys over at RIM have put some extra effort in balancing the feedback of the screen and the regular keys making it quite consistent and thus switching seamlessly between both controls is seamless.

The quality of the display is also really impressive with nice vibrant colors, good brightness and contrast. The legibility under direct sunlight is also faultless making up for a very impressive unit overall.

There is really little to complain about the display of the BlackBerry Storm 9500. Right on the contrary - it manages to provide users with a very different touchscreen experience, which in this increasingly competitive market is anything but easy.

Now, we can see how some people may smell a major contradiction here: why add the burden of press to an already fluent and responsive capacitive touchscreen. Here's what we think.

Even if the novelty of the system only boils down to a self assertion stunt, the SurePress implementation is still secure and fluent enough to impress.

You can look at it this way: the Berry has the iPhone screen (plus some extra pixels on top for pure 4:3 aspect ratio) and the click thing is an extra bonus in certain scenarios and almost never a liability. Typing (once you get the hang of it) on the virtual QWERTY keypad is as close to physical as we've seen. Incidental hitting of links in the browser is completely ruled out - touch won't do, a gentle press is needed.

User interface Now this is a critical aspect of every touchscreen device. The BlackBerry Storm 9500 runs on a touch-optimized version of the BlackBerry OS, which is pretty attractive at first sight. The icons are nicely drawn and finger optimized and there are some pretty decent transitions here and there too.

However, once you dig deeper you come across some pretty late nineties-looking text only submenus. Those are not too much of an issue but still we cannot help noting that it wouldn't have been such an effort to perk them up a bit.

Compared to any of the other touch UIs on the market (TouchWiz, Apple's portable OS X, the upcoming S-class and even the S60 5th edition) those parts of the menu look well dated.

Telephony is much better looking Getting some eyesores from the phonebook we went over to inspecting the Storm telephony and we were in for a nice treat this time.

The BlackBerry Storm 9500 in-call screen offers four large and easy to press buttons plus five shortcuts to features you are most likely to need during a call. Those include notes, calendar, contacts, dial pad and home screen. Well that last one might not be what you need during a call but it's the quickest way to an application that is not on the list.

Music player is OK A few cosmetic changes here and there and touch-optimization is all that sets the Storm 9500 apart from its mortal BlackBerry siblings. Duly conservative looks and decent functionality is about what you'd expect of such a device. The business background of the Storm shines through but actually the all-about-music Nokia 5800 XpressMusic isn't much too far ahead and that should count.

The music player of the Storm sorts the music library automatically by artist, album and genre and you can search your tracks by gradual typing. You can also create your own playlists in no time.

Album art is also supported and if you don't like the default sound of the device you can enhance it by activating on of the equalizer presets.

Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in background. You can then go back to it via the task manager or through the main menu. In any case, some kind of desktop shortcut would have been appreciated but unfortunatelly they chose to leave it out.

Unexpectedly good audio quality Now here is one that got us by surprise. The BlackBerry Storm 9500 has remarkable audio quality, performing well in every aspect of our test. It easily ranks among the best on the market in terms of audio output and this isn't what we really expected from it.

Video player is crippled Watching videos on the BlackBerry Storm 9500 is OK too. The video player works in fullscreen mode and you can opt for portrait or landscape view. A touch on the display makes the virtual buttons appear so you can control the player.

There is lack of proper DivX and XviD support meaning you will have to convert your videos to MPEG-4 or WMV for them to play properly on the Storm.

Image gallery is OK The image gallery of the Storm is hardly spectacular, being simply a touch-optimized version of what its predecessors have. Not that it's unsightly or functionally crippled - in fact it is doing pretty well overall with the 100% zoom shortcut earning our appreciation.

The photos can also be zoomed in on to see more detail but the screen resolution makes sure you won't need it as much as usual. We are particularly happy with the zoom to actual size shortcut that exists on the BlackBerry devices. This gives you a quick and easy way to review photos in the finest detail possible.

Overall, picture browsing is decently fast but the zooming is on the slow side. It takes about a second for each zoom step even when dealing with 3 megapixel photos, let alone higher-res ones. At least the panning is OK.

Camera not up to scratch BlackBerry Storm 9500 is equipped with a 3.15 MP autofocus camera and a LED flash. However the imaging capabilities of the device are pretty limited with usability, image quality and functionality all below average.

The horrendous camera interface of the Storm is an indication that RIM got most things terribly wrong in this department. There is a status bar appearing at all times hiding a good portion of what actually ends up in the picture. This means that proper framing is a grave challenge.

Next up, the UI itself is pretty uncomfortable to work with as there are no shortcuts on the screen meaning that you have to go in the menu to change the settings. Not that there are too many settings you can apply, as those are quite limited.

The glimmer of hope here is image-geotagging, which allows you to automatically record your location in the images' EXIF data.

The few other offered settings are: white balance, color effects and image stabilization. There is also the obligatory picture size and quality.

What bothers us even more than the interface is the picture quality of the BlackBerry Storm 9500. It is well below the average performance in the 3MP league. The amount of resolved detail falls seriously short of impressive. Probably part of the explanation is the extremely aggressive noise reduction applied, which eradicates all fine detail and gives the photos a distinct oil-painting look.

The phone also has a problem with corner softness, with images lacking any sharpness at all near the edges. Contrast and dynamic range are also below par, though the colors are relatively precise. Generally we can hardly think of something good to say about the Storm camera.

Here go the sample photos so you can see what we are talking about.

Truth be told, the camera is one of the most disappointing parts of the BlackBerry Storm (with the video playback restrictions being a close second). If taking photos with your mobile phone is your thing you should definitely look elsewhere - you could get a real imaging touchscreen machine like the LG KC910 Renoir or the Samsung M8800 Pixon for less money. However if you only take an occasional shot every now and then and don't bother downloading them to a PC you might get to live with it.

Web browser is quite nice The web browser of BlackBerry Storm is a whole lot better than its connectivity set. Nicely touch-optimized, it takes the otherwise good BlackBerry application to a whole new level. The extraordinary touchscreen really makes a difference here, making sure you will never again hit a link by mistake. Now, if only they'd added Flash support all would've been just fine.

Panning is the done by sweep gestures, and zoom is controlled by tapping on the screen. You can also zoom using the shortcut keys appearing on the screen in non-fullscreen mode or via the relevant menu. However that last option is hardly comfortable so we doubt anyone will use it too often. When you zoom in by tapping on a desired column the text does automatically center onscreen.