The reviews are in on the Storm, the new touch-screen phone from Research In Motion, and nobody loves it. Check out takes from CNET, Engadget, Gizmodo, and Time for a sample.
In particular, the mechanics of the touch screen--you have to press areas on the screen with some force, as if they're actually keys--have been greeted with almost universal frustration.
Looks great, but how does it sound?
(Credit: CBS Interactive)But for a would-be iPhone killer, the reviews are remarkably light on the Storm's music features. It's true that BlackBerry users are traditionally e-mail junkies, and the phone's communications features (apart from the touchscreen weirdness) are expectedly top-notch. But if this is going to be a consumer phone--Verizon's attempt to make up for its epic fail in passing up first rights to the iPhone--music is critical. A big part of the appeal of the iPhone is that you don't have to carry around a separate cell phone and MP3 player anymore.
Apparently, though, the Storm isn't much of an improvement over the nontouch BlackBerry Bold, which was announced in the summer and came out a couple weeks ago. The Storm's got an 8GB microSD card, as opposed to the Bold's 1GB, but otherwise, it uses the same media management program from Roxio (known for creating functional but not particularly user-pleasing software) and the same ability to sync your iTunes library, and that's about it. There's no on-board music store, although this Time review says a deal with Rhapsody is imminent. (No V Cast? That's no big loss.) And the BlackBerry app store isn't set to launch until March--the current iteration has only eight apps--which means you won't have any great musical add-ons like Shazam, Bloom, Finetune, OurStage, or JamBase.
Of course, if you want a smartphone with a touch screen, and you insist on using Verizon, you're probably going to buy one of these. In fact, you probably already have. But if you're a music fan, don't count on replacing your MP3 player with this particular phone.
Smartphone fans are excited about yesterday's announcement of the Blackberry 9000, aka Blackberry Bold, aka Research In Motion's iPhone killer. But Blackberry users are a different breed than iPhone users--the Blackberry's reason for existence is always-connected e-mail, and Blackberry users tend to be all business, afraid of being out of touch for even a moment. (An old friend in Washington D.C.--where Blackberry users are legion--had to make a vow after her third child was born not to check her e-mail after 6 p.m.)
Coming soon to the Blackberry: iTunes music syncrhonization.
(Credit: RIM)So while the iPhone grew out of the iPod, and thus counts music playback as one of its primary features, the Blackberry Bold focuses more on its core communications features--e-mail, messaging, and telephony--as well as new physical improvements, like a bright color screen. You can see this focus in the first detailed hands-on review of the product at Crackberry.com, where media playback isn't even mentioned until part III (of IV) and gets no more than a paragraph. And 1GB of onboard memory isn't really enough for serious music listeners anyway, although it's expandable to 16GB.
But the clearest indication of all: while the 9000 might echo past Blackberries and ship with a Roxio application for organizing music on your PC and transferring it to your phone, RIM is also preparing a new application called Blackberry Media Sync that will let you use Apple's iTunes to transfer files to the phone. Of course, once you do get music onto the device, a relatively powerful internal stereo speaker system might actually make listening without headphones a reasonable option--sort of like the boombox of tomorrow. The iPhone's speakers are apparently not quite up to the task.
Still, for music fans in desperate need of a new phone--like me--the iPhone is still the most obvious choice, especially now that a 3G model is almost certainly on the way. But if you're already a Blackberry fan, or are primarily concerned with having access to e-mail at all times, the 9000 seems like the clearest alternative to the iPhone.
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