Research in Motion has a new phone that’s “officially called the BlackBerry Storm,” David Pogue reports for The New York Times. “But I’ve got a better name for it: the BlackBerry Dud.”
The Storm’s “entire screen acts like a mouse button. Press hard enough, and it actually responds with a little plastic click… As a result, the Storm offers two degrees of touchiness. You can tap the screen lightly, or you can press firmly to register the palpable click,” Pogue reports. “It’s not a bad idea. In fact, it ought to make the on-screen keyboard feel more like actual keys… Unfortunately, RIM has completely botched the execution.”
“The Storm even muffs simple navigation tasks. When you open a menu, the commands are too close together; even if your finger seems to be squarely on the proper item, your click often winds up triggering something else in the list,” Pogue reports. “There’s no momentum to the scrolling, either, as on the iPhone… In short, trying to navigate this thing isn’t just an exercise in frustration — it’s a marathon of frustration.”
“Now, I wouldn’t come down this hard on some product — especially one that was so eagerly anticipated, customers lined up at dawn on the day of its release — without getting a second, third and fourth opinion. And I’m telling you, there wasn’t a soul who tried this machine who wasn’t appalled, baffled or both,” Pogue reports. “And that’s before they discovered that the Storm doesn’t have Wi-Fi.”
Pogue asks, “How did this thing ever reach the market? Didn’t anyone at RIM actually try it? Or was everyone involved just too terrified to pull the emergency brake on this train?”
There’s much more – highly recommended – in the full report of the train wreck, er… review of RIM’s BlackBerry Storm, headlined “Blackberry Storm Downgraded To A Depression,” here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]
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