RIM BlackBerry 9530 Smartphone

Overview:
I’ve had the Blackberry Storm from Verizon Wireless for almost three weeks now.  So far I’m happy with it, but there are LOTS of little issues that could be better about it.

This is Blackberry and Verizon’s attempt to compete with AT&T’s iPhone.   Well… It’s definitely not the iPhone.   It lacks some of the features and ease of use.  But it’s still not terrible.

It seems that the Storm was “rushed to market” trying to get them in stores before Christmas.    Purchasers of the first delivered units report lots of firmware issues and having to upgrade their firmware several times in the first months.

The first thing I want to note is this thing isn’t near as fast as it is in the Verizon TV commercials.   It doesn’t load any page instantly as they show….

My below review is to detail all the things I’ve noticed about the phone that if I was looking to buy it that I would be interested to know.  I hope to come back and update this review as time and usage of them phone continutes.

Cost
Cost on this phone with the Verizon Contract was $249 bucks.  For some reason I get a discount based on where I work, so that knocked $100 bucks off.  Verizon also has a $50 mail in rebate, so in the end, I got it for $99 bucks.  Not a bad deal.

Transferring Phone Numbers from your old phone:
When I got the Storm, Verizon included a document that said to use Verizon Backup Assistant to backup phone numbers and load them on your new phone.  This is a software app that you can download for a cost or free if you have “My Verizon” web access.   After I had downloaded this from my old phone, I went about trying to restore it to my new Verizon Blackberry Storm only to find that BlackBerry/Verizon doesn’t have this application available for the Storm (even though their paperwork they included suggests using it).   In order to transfer your phone numbers over, you have to take the phone to a Verizon Service Center and pay to have them transferred.  

This was an unneeded hassled when this feature should have been included in the first place.    Anyone who gets a new phone now days needs to be able to do this and shouldn’t have to go wait in line at a service center to complete it.

Setup:
Plan on spending at least an hour on the phone with a Verizon tech support to get many of the features of this phone working.  Call from a land line and not your cell phone.  You have to get them to enable certain things, such as your email access, your web access, and your GPS access.  You have to go in and set up accounts on Blackberry.com, etc, to get this all working.   It’s not as quick as getting your normal cell phone working….

But after you get your email setup, it works like a charm.

Keyboard:
The keyboard takes a little “getting used to”.  It’s definitely not perfect.   You have to learn to type on it and it’s still frustrating sometimes.   You can type in normal test message mode or turn it sideways have a QWERTY keyboard that I find works better.   If you misspell a word, it will try to correct for you.

It would be nice if you could plug in a USB keyboard for when you have to enter a lot of data into it.  But I don’t think this is supported.

Email:
Email actually works pretty good.  So far I’m Impressed.   It can support several different email servers.  I’m just using it to check my Yahoo personal email and it works fine with that.    The only things I could say that needed added was on the delete key, the ability to mark it as SPAM.

You can click on links in the email and open them in the browser and also open attachments.   Viewing pics that are attached via email is easy to do.  Just click on them and it opens them.  You can then save them to your memory card if desired.   There is a limit on attachment size though.  I think it’s something like 3.9mb.

It would also be nice that if you could set the email alerts to have a “quiet time” for night time.   Many people keep their cell phones charging in their bedrooms in case of an important/emergency night time phone call, but don’t really want to listen to it chirp each time an email comes in while you’re sleeping.   Yes you can set the alert to silent, but you have to do that manually through several click/steps to set it, and then repeat to turn it back on it the morning.  It would be much easier if you had an option of “email alert quiet time”  between a user defined time period.   For example, between 10pm and 7am, no audible email alerts and let users choose the times.

I was disappointed to learn that there is not a way to download your email contact list from your primary email application.   According to the person I talked to at Verizon, you have to enter them in all manually.   This is frustrating…..

Web Browser:
The Web Browser is “decent“, but not great.   You have to learn how to use it.  Simply clicking on a link will often just result in the screen zooming in.   To click on a link you have to touch the link for about 1 second and let it highlight/select it, then press harder to activate it.   Websites with small links such as page numbers can be hard to use.

Some web sites have a page that is optimized for mobile devices.   You will find that using the mobile link is much easier to read on the screen and doesn’t include all the graphics that slow down the connection.  If you find a favorite website that you like that has the mobile feature and it’s not auto-detecting, then just click on the mobile “skin” link and then save that link in your Bookmarks.

You can also click a setting to show the web page in column view.  This takes all the columns (frames) on the web page and puts them in one big long view.   It actually makes some pages easier to read or navigate w/o having to zoom in/out all the time.   Some pages don’t work well with this feature though.

Browser Cache.  There seems to be some issues with Browser cache not clearing reloading changing websites when needed.  One example of this is viewing any forum that has posts that change a lot, such as ones that use the vBulletin software.  You have to manually refresh pages sometimes.  This is frustrating.  There doesn’t seem to be a setting in the browser setting to determine when it’s got to reload  a page.

Some websites such as ESPN and CNN will allow you to click a link on their website that will install a CCN (or other) “Icon” or “Button” in the applications menu on your Storm.  This way if you want to view CNN directly, all you have to do is click the CNN Icon/Button application and it will take you directly there.

It would be nice if you could run more than one application of the browser and switch between them, for example, when you need to do something on one website and don’t want to loose your place, but need to switch to another website for something else.  Apparently that feature isn’t available.   Maybe if Mozilla Firefox becomes available for the Blackberry you can try that.

Data Plans:
In order to use any of the above Data, Web, or Email packages, you have to buy a “data package” from Verizon.   Plan on adding about $30 bucks a month to your bill.  

But wait… There’s more!   The plan doesn’t cover text messaging.  You have to buy another plan for that….    The crazy thing is that you can send long email messages all day and it’s included in the data plan.   Send a couple word text message and Verizon charges you.

You also have to pay for the GPS package.  It’s another $9.95/month.

You can tether this as a modem on your laptop, but it might cost additional charges for data usage.

Desktop Manager Software:
I was hoping that I could access the contacts and calendar function of the Storm with the Desktop Manager Software like you can with Palm Pilot Devices.  This way you can add calendar events or contacts from the ease of use of your full size PC keyboard, then sync with the handheld device.   Well, it doesn’t appear that you have any access to the information stores in Contacts or the Calendar on the Storm from your PC when it’s hooked up.   The Destkop Manager Software apparently only lets you update the software of your phone and backup the contacts and calendar.    While that might have some use if you ever have to reset your phone, it’s still pretty frustrating to not be able to access this device.   This is one thing that Blackberry could make major improvements on.

Because data access from the Desktop Manager software is so poor, you’ll find youself emailing your Storm with information or links that you want to store on it so you don’t have to type them all in.

Camera:
The phone has a 3.2mp camera built in.  response speed is pretty slow and it doesn’t take the best pictures.   The positive thing I have to say so far about the camera is that it uses almost the entire screen as the view finder.  But if you move the camera any, the refresh of pixels time on the screen is really slow and hard to follow a moving object.

Reviewing pictures is easy as you just use your finger to slide each picture over to the next like turning  page.  But it takes a while to load big pictures, which indicates a slow data bus since the pictures are stored locally on the micro-SD card.

Speaking of the screen, it won’t take any time at all before you scratch your screen.  Go ahead and get some of the Screen Protectors from your Verizon Store.   They are little pieces of custom fit film that cover your screen and protect it.   The cost is $9.95 for 3 of them.  Kinda ridiculous for 3 pieces of plastic film, but you expect that from Verizon.  Oh well.    Reports from others are that the aftermarket ones don’t work as well.  FYI.

Battery Life:
Overall, the battery life is nothing compared to a traditional cellular phone.  But it does much more than a phone so some of that can be expected.   My traditional cell phone I could go several days of 24 hour operation without having to charge it.     Just barely using my Storm and it’s down to 50% battery life by the end of the day.   If I use it a lot, it will be down to about 20%.   So you will have to charge it daily.

The only good thing about the Storm and charging is that you can charge it from a USB port on your PC, so when you get to work you can plug it in and let it charge at your desk and don’t have to carry an extra charger with you.  You just need the ‘mini-USB’ cable.

I think you should also be able to use a USB 12vdc car charger that is universal instead of buying the $30 one from Verizon, but I haven’t verified this yet.

The Blackberry home page says the battery will last up to 15 days in standby.   I doubt mine would last 5 days if I didn’t make a call on it.     Maybe if you don’t have it check for incoming mail it might last longer, but 15 days is Blackberry really stretching expectations.

If you want a second battery, it appears they are about $50 bucks apiece and doesn’t exclude an external charger…. 

You really need the ability to swap the battery out also (like within one minute) without having to turn your phone off if you had a second battery.   (Of course if they added this feature, then they’d need some “phone reset button” because otherwise taking your battery out is the only way to reboot the phone sometimes).

I don’t think the iPhone has a replaceable battery for comparison.   So although expensive for purchasing a second battery and charger, it’s at least an option on the Storm.

Memory:
The phone comes with 1GB on board memory and it shipped from Verizon with a 8gb micro-SD removable memory card installed.    It didn’t however come with the SD “shoe-horn” for putting it into a SD-HC memory card reader, but you can access this card still by plugging in your USB cable into the side of the Storm.

The removable memory micro-SD card is a nice feature that the iPhone doesn’t have.  It allows you to upgrade the memory card or change it to another card for different music or for data or photos, or to put the card in a different device.

Touch Screen:
The touch screen is pretty sensitive and works fairly well so far.   It automatically changes from “Portrait” to “Landscape” mode if you turn the phone 90 degrees to the left/right.    Sometimes it doesn’t work as expected and you have to turn it a few times to get it orientated properly.

The biggest issue with the screen turning is when you pick it up when the phone is ringing.   Moving the phone from the flat position lying on a desk to the hand holding position causes it to not know what orientation it’s in and moves the Answer button around on the screen as it moves from Portrait to Landscape or flips upside down.   So you have to “chase” the Answer button to answer the phone.  It would be a lot easier for the phone to lock into one position until you hit the Answer button in cases when it’s ringing.   What happens is sometimes you end up hitting it more than once thinking that you didn’t press it initially and the second hit

Wireless Connetivity:
Unfortunately the only way to connect wirelessly is using the Verizon Cellular network.  This phone does NOT support 802.11g wireless Ethernet like the iPhone does.   This is a major disappointment as it means that if you’re in a building that you loose cellular signal, but have wireless Ethernet, such as a hotel or convention center, that you have limited data access.    Or even at home where about everyone has a wireless router now days… This is one area that the iPhone has the Storm beat.

The Storm does however allow you to use your phone as a “wireless modem” for connection to your PC.  I’m not sure how well this work as I haven’t tested it with the Storm before, but I imagine that it will work similar to the Verizon “Air card” (PCMCIA wireless modem), which is “ok” on speed.

It does support Bluetooth, but I haven’t tried that yet.

Music / MP3:
I haven’t used it as a MP3 player yet, but it did come with a set of earphones. Whether it’s as good as the iPod, I don’t know yet.

However, it won’t drop into my BOSE DockStation that supports the iPod and the iPhone, so that’s a disappointment.   



Verizon Navigator (GPS):
I am not impressed so far with this feature.   The GPS appears first off not to be a real GPS, but uses triangulation between cell phone towers to determine your location.   Well this isn’t very accurate.   I’ve found the location to be way off on the address often and also thinks you’re on a different parallel road.

For the $9.95/month they charge for this feature, it should work better.    (FYI. AT&T Wireless doesn’t charge a monthly fee for their GPS feature access and they use Google Maps, which is much nicer).

This feature also includes the ability to look up restaurants, stores, gas stations, events, etc near you.   The negative about this is that the information isn’t stores on your phone but it has to download it via the cell tower each time you need new information. So it’s not super quick.    Seeing how it’s kept in a database on Verizon’s servers, you’d figure they could keep it up to date better, but it has restaurants in the list that have been closed for over 2 years for example.

The event location feature is pretty worthless.  It doesn’t have any local events listed or even any in my state.  All the event venues and events listed as closest to me are in other states.  So it’s pretty worthless.

The ability to look up local gas prices near your GPS location is nice, but definitely not worth the $9.95 monthly VZ Navigator fee.

Also included in this feature is a “traffic notification” on your GPS maps.  All the times I’ve checked it, it’s never reported any traffic.   Might work if you live in a big city like Los Angeles, but so far to me it’s not be a usable feature worth paying the VZ Navigator fees.

VZ Navigator also includes local weather.  I was really disappointed with their weather feature.  It only offers forecast and current temps, which you can get off any website.  It doesn’t have any storm information or weather radar that you might need in the event of a thunderstorm.   So it’s pretty useless and definitely not worth the price of having the VZ Navigator fee either….

If you want a decent mobile PDA weather site, check out Weather Underground site and click on their mobile link and enter your city. Then just add that link as a bookmark in your Browser on your Blackberry.    Much better information and it’s FREE.

If you want a GPS, go buy a Garmin GPS and don’t bother with the VZ Navigator.  The yearly cost of the VZ Navigator access fee will pay for the Garmin GPS in no time and you don’t have to stop using your GPS to answer the phone.

New Applications:
It seems that the Storm doesn’t have much in the way of extra applications on the phone.    It has a calculator and a task list and can open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, but that’s about it.   You can download a few applications from the Applications Store on Verizon’s website, but that’s it…  Nothing compared to applications that you can get for the iPhone or the Palm Pilot.

A quick Google search finds there are some third party and freeware applications though.

As for games that comes on the Storm, only two… BrickBreaker and Word Mole.  Kinda disappointing it didn’t at least have a solitaire game.   Oh well.

Supposedly BlackBerry is opening it’s on Applications Store to download Apps from in order to compete with iPhone’s  “App Store”.

I was also disappointed it didn’t have a weather radar application or a stock price checker application.   Something that should be included on any phone that wants to be cutting edge.

The phone also doesn’t have a PDF application.   You can however view a PDF if you email it to your phone, but it does a lower resolution “scan” and treats it as as picture.

There is also “File Manager” to manage files in your memory card.   This is a negative.

Other interesting features/information and issues:
Below is a list of other features or other information that the phone has or would be nice to have that doesn’t really warrant a separate section all on it’s on.

You can turn off the phone feature and network/data connections in “Manage Connections” application.  This is useful if you want to use the device as a MP3 player in somewhere you can’t use a phone, such as an airplane.  It will also help conserve battery power in areas where you can’t get a digital signal.

There is no “hot button” to change the phone to silent or vibrate mode.  Like press a * or # key down like on a traditional cell phone.   This would be an easy software feature to add, yet it’s not there.

The “rubber feet” on the bottom of the device are mounted close to the center line of the phone.  So when you’ve got it on your desk and push on an icon, etc… if the icon or button is on the outside of the screen, expect the device to wobble as you’re pushing outside the rubber feet.     Just poor design that they should have caught.

Google Maps doesn’t work well on the Storm.   However there is an app you can download from http://www.blackberryfreeware.com/ but I haven’t tried it yet.

Get the screen protectors that I mentioned above.

Every now and then the device will get “sluggish” when you click on an application.  Not sure what causes this.   A few times the device has just locked up and the only solution is to remove the battery and “reboot”.   This is frustrating when it happens when you’re receiving a phone call and can’t answer it because it’s locked up.

Unfortunately there is no CTRL-ALT-Del Key.   Oh well.

Browser Cache will not clear as need and load the newest version of the webpage. (this covered above in Browser section).



Summary:
The Summary is that this is a good phone, but it sure needs a lot of extra time to get some cool features that the iPhone has.

If Verizon supported the iPhone, I would have prob bought it instead.

This phone has so much potential if they could just upgrade or add some features and test it a little better before throwing it over the fence to the cosumer.      I still would reccomend it though as it will get better.


UPDATE - March 2009:
I've had this phone now for several months now and thought an update would be helpful to folks.

Battery Update:
I've already had to replace my battery.  It started to die and would die after leaving the phone on all day even after 20 minutes of talk time was all I'd used for the day.   Luckily it was barely still within the first 30 days of use on the phone and Verizon replaced it under warranty.   Still odd for a battery to die so quickly.

GPS Update:
I've been very dissappointed with the GPS.

The first thing is that the maps are all "downloaded" each time the screen refeshs.  If you're in a poor cellular area, then you get a slow download time of the map.  or it doesn't download it properly.

The map also doesn't "center the vehicle arrow" in the center of the map like a normal GPS does....  it will ride it right up to the edge of the screen.  So it's hard to see what roads are ahead on the "next screen" until it reloads it.   Just a poor design feature compared to dedicated GPS's.

The battery life with the GPS is really bad.   If you use your GPS even for a few minutes, it seems to really kill your battery.   Even if you only used it for a few minutes then the battery will go dead quicker throughout the day after using the GPS.   Reading up on the GPS on the Blackberry user forums, there appears to be some "software memory leaks" with the operating system and the GPS software and that cause some of the problems.    They suggested that you reboot your phone (power on/off) and it will solve this problem.   So after I use the GPS, I simply power the phone on and off and they are right that it really does help with the battery not being run down by whatever GPS process still might be running.

I wonder now if that was what was killing my "first battery".

Applications:
All those iPhone commericials with the cool applications sure wish the Blackberry had at least some of them.  **sigh**.