BlackBerry Storm 9530 Review
The BlackBerry Storm 9530, hyped as the iPhone Killer, is beautiful, sleek and the first BlackBerry with a touch screen. The Storm , a wide touch screen device boasts of many of the same features that the iPhone has and features such as Clickable display and has RIM’s famous email and messaging services. It outperforms most BlackBerrys with its 3.2 megapixel auto-focus still and video camera and manages to pack numerous features into a stylish form factor. Sure, Apple might have more groomed products than this, but it carries a better design than the HTC phones. Not being an Apple means not only does one loose the polish but the snappy and fluid interfaces also. However, it being a BlackBerry means it has a lot of capabilities can be customized and the freedom to choose functionalities. The email integration is perhaps the best we have ever seen in any phone. It does lack Wi-Fi and a QWERTY keyboard and has been accused of sluggish performance.
Verizon has launched 2 more firmware updates and we believe this has greatly improved the performance of the device by resolving the bugs and improving general performance. These firmware updates make it a stable device that should please the owners. Is the device that good even in a closer introspect? Scroll down to find out.
Design:
Simply Stunning:
The Storm looks stunning. The moment you lay your eyes on it, you would realize that a lot of time has gone into designing the phone. It has not strayed far from the usual business phone design but unlike the previous Blackberries the 9530 has a different build quality. It sports a Black casing with silver accent and has a trapezoidal shape with rounded edges. At 2.4 inches wide by 0.5 inches deep and 44.4 inches tall, it feels a bit wide when you hold it in your hand. It weighs about 5.6 ounces and that is about the average weight of phones in its category. So, the Storm is a well constructed phone with a nice solid feel and a soft touch finish to provide grip. It does not creak or rattle or budge or deform and still feels like a solid business phone.
Simple Layout:
Not only is the casing hard, but the buttons are sturdy as well. The silver bezel around the phone makes it look gorgeous. The bands are probably made of plastic and not metal and trace the outline of the phone whereas the rest of the surface is glossy black plastic. The screen dominates the front of the phone and it has four buttons on the bottom: Phone, Menu, Back and End/Power buttons. It also lacks a trackball navigator and hence allows for easier one handed operation. On the left side of the device is a convenience key and a micro USB port. RIM has preferred this over the more common mini USB slot for a lower profile of the newer variation. On the right is present another convenience key, a volume rocker and the 3.5 mm headphone jack. On the back of the casing, you will find the solid aluminum brushed piece with the camera and flash on the plate. The top of the phone has a single LED on the right and the mute keys incorporated on either side. When compared to the previous models, the hardware and components used in the phone seem superior and this shows its class.
Huge Screen:
The design was awe-inspiring for sure, but the display was altogether another story. The Touch screen was a reason for it to be in the news, but so is its 3.25 inch VGA display which shows amazing sharpness and brightness. Let the big screen not fool you in to thinking that you have got a 16:9 screen as the phone plays only 4:3. Capable of showing 65000 colours at a resolution of 480 x 360 pixel resolution, it did not impress as much as the BlackBerry Bold did. Nevertheless, it is still beautiful. One has the ability to adjust fonts, sizes, type and backlighting. There is an accelerometer available which allows one to change the orientation of the screen from landscape to portrait when the phone is tilted from horizontal to a vertical position. Oh, the screen was durable as well and resisted tendencies to get scratched.
Touch Screen:
This was perhaps the place where most of the attention was focused on. Unlike the iPhone and Instinct, the Storm does not just boast of a capacitive touch display, but the screen is also clickable as well. It uses a technology called SurePress which allows you to click the screen down like a mouse button. The main reason to provide this is to hover without selecting or moving an onscreen element and that we have a tendency to click down while navigating or typing on most devices. That is, when you push the screen down, it would be like pressing down a tactile button.
Virtual Keyboard:
The BlackBerry Storm 9530 features a soft keyboard which can be used not only in portrait mode but also in landscape mode as well. Initially there was only a SureType keyboard available, but with the new upgrades one has the option of a fully fledged QWERTY keyboard. It is not automatic though, you will have to enable it by pressing the BlackBerry Menu and selecting the Enable Full Keyboard option. The Screen is fairly sensitive and hence, a single simple touch over the item would highlight the item and then you press down to register the action. With all this, we kept forgetting that we could use tapping to do an action. But here, we realised that having a tactile keyboard would have been better. Typing long messages was not really easy on the Storm and it gets worse if you have big thumbs.
Minor Niggles:
Yes, the BlackBerry looks great, but we did notice some minor faults we wish would have not been that noticeable. Backlight was leaking through the sides of the phone and this killed the continuity of the design. When the screen was pressed down and held, it slid down. Not really huge problems and can be looked over.
Features:
Blackberry OS 4.7:
The OS used on the Phone is similar to the one used in the earlier BlackBerrys notably the Bold. But the reason we are discussing about the UI here is because unlike the previous models this BlackBerry lacks a trackball. Though there is no paradigm shift in the approach, rather the company has added the touch and multi touch functionality to replace the trackball approach. Unlike the iPhone, the Storm’s UI is not customized for touch navigation. Things that the iPhone is good at such as flickering through lists, moving around in a webpage are uncomfortable to do on the Storm. Though the screen seems sensitive enough, the finger cannot be entirely trusted to take control of the device.
No QWERTY:
BlackBerrys are the ultimate phone when it comes to email and messaging. RIM partly attributes its success to the inclusion of QWERTY keyboards on their phones. You might believe that the inclusion of the clickable touch screen would make things easier. However, we disagree. We were constantly frustrated by the laggy movement and found it difficult to type long messages on the phone. RIM also provides a T9 dictionary which was not able to correct minor errors. All this makes you wish for a QWERTY keypad.
Implementation of the other functions:
Copying and Pasting, a norm on the RIM phones has fully represented here with multi touch functionality. If you want to copy/ paste text, select the beginning and end of a text with 2 fingers and a menu pops up. Too zoom into pages, one can double tap and to back out you will have to use the negative magnifying glass. The technology is great, but we believe that it has a long way to go before it can compete with the iPhone for virtual keyboard domination. If speed is not a concern for you, then the phone is manageable.
Browser:
One area where the Storm seems to be good at is the Web browser. If you have used the Bold’s Web browser, you would know that load times were painful and using it was torturous. In short, totally unusable. The Storm has a better implementation of the browser than its predecessors. Page loading times were fast and navigation was snappier. The scrolling was tolerable and zooming is faster. Highly admirable, but the Mobile Safari and the G1’s web kit based “ Chrome light” have more advanced features such as multiple tabs.
Messaging and e-mail:
Messaging and email has always been RIM’s stronghold. There are not many changes in this segment, except for a couple of visual effects. The use of screen real estate and selection of fonts seems to be a bit outdated when compared to the iPhone. Reading email was still inconsistent and we found account management simpler. People who were looking for Gmail integration would be disappointed.
Software:
The 4.7 is not a huge improvement over the 4.6 but there are a couple of improvements that were worthy of mention. The Home screen is like a typical BlackBerry experience. There are 2 levels of application screens: The initial home screen allows you to house 8 applications icons of your choice. The second level is a deeper level that displays all your folders and icons. BlackBerry fans used to a real keyboard will be feeling lost here. It also fails to recognise longer presses, shortcuts or find as you type searches on typical RIM devices. There are a couple of tweaks in the OS, the cross fades and swipes of pages are some of them.
Third Party Software:
The Storm 9530 Touch Screen Mobile Phone hardly has any third party software and can be termed nonexistent. The representatives from the company have assured that they have plans to launch their version of the app store. There is a broad selection of applications such as the “To Go” suite that allows viewing and editing of PowerPoint, Excel and Word documents. For more advanced options, one has to buy the premium version.
GPRS:
Verizon VZ Navigator Software provided with the RIM BlackBerry Storm 9530 is not really great to use. The navigator gives spoken turn by turn directions and even incorporates traffic into the narration. Though it worked well, it is not really worth shelling out extra cash for it. There are a lot of options such as movie times, traffic and local search included in it. It was able to garner excellent results in terms of signal reception and tracking. But, the software was sluggish and abysmally slow. Alternatives such as Google Maps offer walking directions and transit directions as well.
Other Applications:
The BlackBerry Storm 9530 Smartphone features Visual Voice mail which displays who left you a voice mail and how long the message is. Though it takes about 10 seconds longer than the normal voice mail, it is worth the wait. One can compose a new text/MMS, call back the caller, reply to the caller via SMS or erase a message as well under the Visual Voicemail menu.
Media Player:
The Storm’s inbuilt media player is capable of playing several audio and video formats such as WMA, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, AMR-NB, and MIDI music files, and MPEG4, WMV, DivX4, XviD (partial support), and H.263 video clips. There is a search function, playlist function, shuffle and repeat and there is also a full screen mode for video playback. The software CD included Roxio Easy Media Creator which allows you to create MP3s from CDs and add audio tags. The Storm also works with the Media Sync application which means you can load your iTunes library.
Not Compatible with Mac:
The Storm 9530 is not capable of syncing with a Mac. But for Mac users who happen to use BlackBerry’s there is software called PocketMac provided which does a decent job of loading contacts, calendars and etc. Sadly, the software needs an update badly and does not seem to sync data with the Storm. So, you will have shell out extra for Missing Sync to get your Storm synced with your Mac. Considering that the phone is aimed at the iPhone’s market share, it is outrageous that the phone lacks syncing software.
Camera:
The Camera happens to be one of the strong points in the Storm. When selected, the screen serves as the view finder and resting your finger on the camera button displays a white box, which on further pushing turns green and takes your snap. The resolution of the 3.2 megapixel camera was fantastic. The only problem we found was with the shutter speed. It took a great deal of time for the camera to kick in. Things in bright daylight were good, but with the flash, it was hard to get good results. All we expect is faster times to take a snap.
The Camera menus are logically laid out and are user friendly. On the screen are present the approximate number of pictures that can be still taken, zoom level, flash mode and status and the status of location aware pictures. After one takes a picture, there is the photo displayed with several options such as caller ID or the send option. The picture can be uploaded to your Facebook, Flickr, messengers etc.
Video Recording:
The Video camera also has fairly good quality and clear sound. It allows capturing of 320 x 240 with a bit of heavy artifacting. The 8GB memory card provided allows you to store ample amount of video on the phone. There is the option of video light present that allows you to shoot in dim light and can double as a torch light as well.
Accessories Provided:
The RIM BlackBerry Storm 9530 is provided with a healthy set of accessories: A Travel charger with various adapters, a USB Cable, an 8 GB microSD card, a wired headset, a software CD, some reference material and a SIM card if it is under the Verizon Wireless package.
Performance:
Good Call Quality:
The Call quality of the BlackBerry Storm 9530 using the Wireless service was good. There was no noticeable background noise or voice distortion. Neither did we experience any sort of dropped calls during our tests. The speakerphone did not fare as well as the call quality. There was choppy call quality on both sides and there was a tendency for the words to get cut off. There was also noticeable voice distortion on both ends. Though we were able to carry on full conversations, we did have trouble in catching what the other person said at the first go.
Media Performance:
The music playback through the phone was good and the volume was loud too. The built in headphone jack would allow for an even better sound quality. Though the video performance was good, it was not as quite as astounding as the BlackBerry Bold. The playback was smooth in spite of more pixilation. The Web browsing was pleasantly fast thanks to the EV DO Rev network. The GPS capabilities were great, but the software was a bit sluggish.
Thank the New firmware update:
Verizon’s new update the version 4.7.0.113 was a huge booster to the Storm’s performance. The software upgrade was downloaded using the desktop manager and the process went smoothly. The biggest improvement noticed was in the accelerometer. The screen orientation was faster and so were response times. Launching applications were better thanks to the response times.
Better BlackBerry:
Thanks to the firmware updates, the BlackBerry Storm 9530 Smartphone with GPS receiver is even more polished. The browser and camera were faster. We did not notice any sort of crashes or freezes. The problem of the phone freezing during income calls or a blank screen while on a call was fixed.
Battery Life:
The Battery of the Storm 9530 is a 1400mAh lithium ion battery with a rated talk time of 5 and half hours and up to 15 days of standby time. When we did our full battery drain test, the phone lasted 7 whole hours. With the original OS and moderate usage, the phone lasted a solid 2 days. The newer firmware version (that is the Updated OS) reduced battery drain. Even on using the phone for at good 36 hours, there is still 50 percent charge on it. The .75 update also solves the previous problem of not being able to the phone while being charged. The phone however tended to get a bit warm where the battery is available.
Warranty:
There is a warranty of one year provided on the BlackBerry Storm 9530 from the date of manufacture.
Verdict:
RIM and Verizon have been desperately trying to push the Storm ahead and make it a threat to the iPhone’s dominance. There has been a lot of commercials, leaks, press releases and special events to celebrate the arrival of the Storm. The Storm has a great stylish design, is designed and backed by RIM, has a great camera and is a worthy competitor to the iPhone. However, here is the hitch; the Storm 9530 is not really as fluid or enjoyable as the iPhone. The considerable lagginess in software and the lack of a decent typing option will turn off several users. But the lack of Wi-Fi is a serious issue and we guess the future version of the Storm will incorporate it. On Paper, the BlackBerry Storm seems as an ideal competitor to the iPhone. Sadly, in Practice, it has some serious glares. Verizon’s firmware updates will solve a major number of them. However, till then let us hope RIM comes up with something better.
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BlackBerry Storm 9530 Mobile Phone – Technical Specification Table
| Manufacturer | RIM |
| Model Name | BlackBerry Storm 9530 |
| 2 G Network | GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 |
| 3 G Network | HSDPA 2100 CDMA2000 1x EV-DO |
| Announced | 2008 September |
| Dimensions | 112.5 x 62.2 x 14 mm |
| Weight | 155 g |
| Display Type | TFT capacitive touch screen, 65K colors |
| Display Size | 360 x 480 pixels, 3.25 inches – Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate |
| Alert Types | Vibration; Downloadable polyphonic, MP3 ringtones |
| Speakerphone | Yes – 3.5 mm audio jack |
| Phonebook Memory | Yes,Photocall |
| Call records | Yes |
| Internal | 1GB storage, 128 MB RAM |
| Card Slot | microSD (TransFlash), up to 16 GB |
| GPRS | Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 – 48 kbps |
| HSCSD | No |
| EDGE | Class 10, 236.8 kbps |
| 3G | HSDPA |
| WLAN | No |
| Infrared | No |
| Bluetooth | Yes, v2.0 with A2DP |
| USB | Yes, v2,0 |
| Camera | 3.15 MP, 2048×1536 pixels, autofocus, LED flash |
| Features | Geo-tagging, image stabilization |
| Video | Yes, QVGA |
| Secondary | No |
| OS | BlackBerry OS |
| CPU | 624MHz processor |
| Messaging | SMS, MMS, Email and Instant Messaging |
| Browser | HTML |
| Radio | No |
| Games | Yes + downloadable |
| Colour | Black |
| GPS | Yes, with A GPS support |
| Java | Yes – BlackBerry maps - Document editor (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) - Media player MP3/WMA/AAC+ - Video player MPEG4/3gp/H.264/WMV - Organizer - Voice dial - Voice memo |
| Battery Type | Standard battery, Li-Ion 1400 mAh |
| Battery Standby | Up to 360h |
| Talk time | Up to 5 h 30 min |
| Warranty | One year |
