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.
I'm seeing a lot of interest in Microsoft's Live Mesh, a file-synchronization service and long-term vision for data-sharing across devices that the company announced at the Web 2.0 conference. It's an interesting vision, although it rehashes some basic ideas that Microsoft's been throwing around for at least seven years. (See this story from 2001: "Microsoft envisions HailStorm as a way for consumers and business customers to access their data--calendars, phone books, address lists--from any location and on any device." Substitute "Live Mesh" for "HailStorm" and it's back to the future all over again!)
But there's very little there today, as Webware's Rafe Needleman points out. I'm going to wait for more deliverables before passing judgment on whether this is really a major change in direction, or a mere feint in the direction of Web 2.0. One thing I know for sure: most of the revenue and all of the profits in Microsoft's earnings call on Thursday will be from software, not services.
One item in Rafe's hands-on review caught my interest, however. Apparently, Live Mesh will let you post certain types of music files (MP3s and, I'm guessing, non-DRM-protected WMA files) from your Mesh-connected devices to the service. Then, using a plug-in based on Microsoft's Silverlight technology, users will be able to stream these files to any device with a Web connection. Once Microsoft gets its cross-platform story ironed out (Silverlight on its way to becoming truly multiplatform; Mesh is Windows-only in this closed-beta stage but is promised for the Mac and mobile devices soon), this could become a great way to make your music collection portable--like Ezmo promised to do before the company ran out of money and shut down.
Go a little further and imagine the Zune team building links to Mesh. For instance, the PC software could transparently sync your collection to the Mesh service, then you'd be able to stream any song in your library to any device with a Web connection. Sort of a celestial jukebox for one.
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