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.
At CES a day before it opens, and although I've been able to sneak into some of the exhibition halls with my press pass, security's wised up and closed the others off to all but people setting up. So I spent a few minutes in the Verizon-sponsored portion of the press booth playing with LG's Voyager 10000, a would-be competitor to the iPhone. They're asking $300 plus a two-year contract commitment--that's $99 cheaper than the least-expensive iPhone, but the Voyager comes with much less memory (this one had 300MB on board), so you'll have to pay extra for a mini-SD card, up to 8GB.
"Amused to Death" by Roger Waters, downloaded via V Cast and played on an LG Voyager. The sound quality was suprisingly good.
(Credit: Matt Rosoff)They had it hooked up to a circular chair-pod thingie with individually controllable left and right speakers, which actually sounded quite amazing considering the files are 160kbps WMA, but my experience was periodically interrupted by the staffers, who apparently were under instructions not to let us listen too long unmolested. Funny thing was, one of the staffers didn't seem to be following the script very well, first mentioning to me that she couldn't believe that people actually paid $1.99 to download a song from V Cast, then claiming she preferred vinyl to all other forms of music and likening digital downloads to "static." Um, isn't it my job to point out the flaws in your products?
My brief experience with the Voyager and V Cast was so-so. The touch screen wasn't as responsive as the iPhone's, and the V Cast service kept returning a "can't connect to the server" error when I tried to download a song, even though the search results were right behind that search screen. I'm glad to see the iPhone has spurring the industry to move forward, but from what I've seen so far, when my Verizon contract's up this summer, they'll have an uphill battle to keep me aboard.
CES before the crowds arrive.
(Credit: Matt Rosoff)
(UPDATE: RealNetworks has filed an 8-K form with the SEC that contains some more details about Rhapsody America. Most notable: MTV is contributing a $230 million note to the deal, and RealNetworks will in exchange be required to spend that amount with MTV on advertising. The joint venture is between RealNetworks and MTV, with Verizon as a distribution partner.)
The 2007 Consumer Electronics Show must've held some awkward moments for Microsoft.
The previous year, the company had trumpeted MTV's Urge music store as the showcase for the Windows Media Player 11 that was due to ship with Vista. Bill Gates had Justin Timberlake on stage to promote the forthcoming service, which would be integrated into the Windows Media Player (as was previously the case with other stores, such as Napster and MSN Music), and would "bring people's emotional connections with music to the forefront of the digital entertainment experience" (said a particularly ebullient press release). At the same show, Microsoft also made a big deal out of Verizon's V Cast service, which was the first to offer both over-the-air and PC-based music downloads using Microsoft's Windows Media Audio technology.
A year later, in 2007, Vista was still not out--the result of a final delay that had the OS missing the 2006 holiday season--so Microsoft was forced to trot out Urge and Windows Media Player 11 yet again as examples of how great digital media would be in Vista. Only this year, there was a new wrinkle: in the interim, Microsoft had announced and launched its own competing music player, software (why "integrate" with the Windows Media Player if you can build your own dedicated app?), and store. None of which were compatible with the vast array of products from long-standing partners, such as MTV and Verizon.
At the time, Microsoft insisted that its PlaysForSure initiative (which identified compatible Windows Media-based players and stores from third parties) was not dead, but would remain on a separate but equal development path from Zune. Apparently the partners didn't believe it. First, Samsung jumped ship, creating its own player-store-software combination. Now MTV and Verizon have teamed up with Microsoft's oldest competitor in the digital music space, RealNetworks. The ink's still drying on the deal, but their goal is to launch a new company, Rhapsody America, that will give users access to a huge library of music from almost anywhere--the "celestial jukebox" that many music fans have been wanting for years.
The alliance makes sense. Rhapsody, which consistently wins praise from reviewers and users, would get a huge marketing boost from both Viacom/MTV (which recently announced plans to spend $500 million expanding its game portfolio) and Verizon, as well as a new distribution channel (inclusion on Verizon phones, sales of over-the-air downloads). MTV gracefully shutters Urge--which never had a chance to get off the ground--without abandoning the online music market altogether, and gets a way to distribute music to mobile phone users. Verizon gets an online subscription service to add to its over-the-air and download-based services.
So now it's Microsoft's move. Will they respond by adding an over-the-air component to Zune? (As SanDisk and Yahoo teamed up to do, and RealNetworks and iRiver plan to do.) An announcement should be coming in the next couple of months if they're going to get anything new out in time the holidays.
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