Stephen Fry & David Pogue slam the BlackBerry Storm

[MacBytes]

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Category: Reviews
Link: Stephen Fry & David Pogue slam the BlackBerry Storm (http://www.macbytes.com/link.php?sid=20081129131722)
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Posted on MacBytes.com (http://www.macbytes.com)
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[ZiggyPastorius]

I too was really excited for the release of this phone, but using, I just can't bring myself to like it. The interface is laggy, to which the Verizon guy said "They should pump out some updates which will smoothen the interface soon..." Which is fine, but as of now, the phone's UI is terrible. I hated the screen. Tried to type a note out on it, which took FOREVER, and it wasn't even coherent. The type correct was basically useless. There's a lot I'd have liked to see RIM address, but honestly, they should've just stuck with physical keys.

[SnowLeopard2008]

RIM makes great phones. EDIT: with physical keys. They should stick to their style which is much better for business users (their main audience). Just because all the other companies (LG, HTC, Samsung, etc) are jumping ship to touchscreen/failing and following Apple does not mean RIM has to as well. Again, the reason why the iPhone is much better is the functionality (not business oriented). They have the App Store and it's already rolling downhill in terms of popularity (pardon the pun) with more and more apps each coming day. RIM can't take that kind of integration. They have their own integration with their devices, their corporate email server. Nice try, but every company has a different business model, sadly, RIM's is not that of the iPhone.

[Demosthenes X]

I got a real kick out of this line:

Hello? Isn’t the thumb keyboard the defining feature of a BlackBerry? A BlackBerry without a keyboard is like an iPod (http://nytimes.com.com/mp3-players/apple-ipod-fifth-generation/4505-6490_7-32069546.html?tag=api&part=nytimes&subj=re&inline=nyt-classifier) without a scroll wheel.

The iPod Touch hasn't got a scroll wheel, and it seems to have worked out pretty well for Apple... ;)

[mkrishnan]

The interface is laggy, to which the Verizon guy said "They should pump out some updates which will smoothen the interface soon..."

If the iPhone is the best case scenario regarding this, I think I wouldn't hold my breath. :o RIM has been very much in the business of rolling out software updates for their phones in the past, but in what I saw, there really weren't major changes to the OS brought about by updates. The smoothing was at an extremely fine-grained level.

RIM makes great phones. EDIT: with physical keys.

This is essentially what David Pogue said as well. The big question for RIM is where they should go next. The Bold is a pretty well nurtured and grown evolution of what the Blackberry concept entailed. And very worthy Berries have been around at least since the 87xx series. Meaning that RIM had already started peaking using their existing approach before the iPhone came out.

Apple rode this curve close to perfectly... the iPod was peaking and showing evidence of onset of market saturation also, in the year preceding the iPhone release. So Apple released game-changing revolutions of their own -- in terms of the iPod interface, in terms of the App store, and in terms of all an iPod can do today -- before anyone else could, which has allowed them to continue growing instead of stagnating.

I think I agree that RIM has never been a catch-up company before, and they don't know and shouldn't play that role. They should do something else. The question is... what? The Storm clearly isn't it

I think there are some really interesting things they could do, that no one has done yet... On the consumer side, they could...

- Integrate Twitter, and perhaps Facebook or Loopt or others, at a much more fundamental way (on a Blackberry, Twitter could show up right at the inbox level and act just like a mail account, for instance)

- Make video voicemails really work. The feature is out there, but it's so clunky no one uses it.

On the business side...

- Figure out how corporate customers could actually use 3G data services, whether that means really good video conferencing, or something no one is even thinking about.

- Make tethering so easy that it becomes irresistible

- Build more services around the core hassle-free, reliable model of e-mail and messaging on the Berry.

I think all of that would be a better investment than aping Apple.

[SnowLeopard2008]

^ 100% agreed. I was sad to see RIM get slammed so badly. RIM! Apple is NOT your competitor! Consumers and Business-sumers are totally different!

[MacTraveller]

Ah, the iPhone versus the Blackberry Storm:

Maybe we are just comparing apples to lemons.