“It’s hard to overstate how important the BlackBerry Storm is to RIM and Verizon. It’s RIM’s bold effort to fend off the iPhone and Verizon’s best hope for a star handset that draws people in, or at least keeps them from bailing… Now that we’ve spent some quality, uninterrupted time with the Storm, here’s why we think it falls short of its promise,” Matt Buchanan reports for Gizomodo.
“It’s surprisingly heavy. Like, heavier than RIM’s manly slab of smartphone, the Bold, at 5.47 oz to the Bold’s 4.7 oz. It feels thick, too, thicker than it actually is, because of its squarish shape. It looks good, it feels okay in your hand. It’s just kind of clunky at the same time,” Buchanan reports. “No Wi-Fi is a bummer… The camera is 3.2MP of noisy noise, like most cellphone cameras. The camera is tarted up with some basic photo editing features and a dedicated flash, but it’s nothing incredible.”
“The major issue with the interface, at least in the main menu area, is that it lags. Like, enough to be annoying. Scrolling through the main menu, for instance, it seems like part of the scroll slowdown is deliberate (I don’t know why) but the sluggishness turned to choppiness more often than occasionally. The transition fades from screen to screen, besides being inconsistent (sometimes you get ‘em, sometimes you don’t), make the OS actually feel slower. And when it does lag, it’s somehow more frustrating because it makes you distrust and pissed off at the SurePress feedback—not good for your major selling point,” Buchanan reports.
“Lag was all over the place, which is a cardinal sin with a touch-based UI. It really needs to be more stable,” Buchanan reports. “I hate to say this, but I kind of came to hate typing on it. Pushing the screen in over and over requires so much more effort than simply gliding my fingers around a good touch keyboard. It was tiring.”
The Storm is “not quite the killer phone that they or Verizon need it to be… I think it fall short of what they were aiming for, and ultimately what all the hype is driving people to expect [and] SurePress is not the end-all, be-all of touchscreen technologies—it’s not really an evolutionary step forward, even.”
There’s much more in the full review – recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: This is quite the debut for RIM’s “iPhone killer,” isn’t it? 
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