28.CELL PHONES BUSINESS

RIM has always been known for their keyboard designs, so we've long been curious how the BlackBerry maker would approach an all-touch design. To produce a software keyboard with a tactile feel, RIM created a clickable screen for the BlackBerry Storm. The phone still uses an ultra-sensitive capacitative touchscreen, similar to what you'll find on the Apple iPhone 3G (compare). You swipe your finger across the long menus for which RIM has become infamous, and when your selection is highlighted, you click the screen to confirm. Sometimes swiping your finger scrolls the list instead of moving the selection highlight. Tap lightly to scroll or select, then press hard to click and make your choice. It's an elegant way of handling the touch interface, and it worked very well in every aspect of this phone, from typing on the keyboard to scrubbing through music tracks to simply managing the menus. RIM has a real innovation on their hands, and this could be a game-changer for folks who have shied away from all-touch phones in the past.

The phone could be very sluggish. Though scrolling and navigation were usually responsive, moving between programs caused a delay. Sometimes, the phone took a couple seconds to respond to button presses. Sometimes the menu button got no response whatsoever. We also encountered some bugs. While trying to enter our password in RIM's Google Talk app, the program actually quit and opened up the camera app. We didn't press the button accidentally, we swear, it just went to the camera, and wouldn't let us take a picture. Strange. Sometimes, we would be swiping our finger on the screen to make a pre-click selection, but the phone would lag behind our movement. Thus, when we clicked on the screen, nothing would happen, because we weren't pressing in the spot where the selection cursor had come to rest.

Calls on our BlackBerry Storm review unit sounded pretty good. We preferred the sound of the RIM BlackBerry Bold on AT&T, but though the BlackBerry Storm had a slightly tinny sound in our calling tests, the quality was consistent across our testing grounds, and callers had no trouble hearing us clearly. The phone got stronger reception than other Verizon Wireless phone's we're testing now. It always seemed to have a full 4-5 bars, even while other phones dipped close to roaming. For battery life, we've been testing the phone on a full charge for a coupe days, and for general e-mail and calling it seemed to hold onto its juice. Activating VZ Navigator drained the battery very quickly, though not as quick as we would have suspected, considering the wide range of resources that a talking, moving navigation program uses.

If the BlackBerry Storm were only loaded with the standard BlackBerry messaging options, it would still be a capable phone. But Verizon Wireless and RIM have gone a step further in providing the Application Center, where many of RIM's popular messaging apps are waiting for download. In addition to the solid SMS and MMS options, there are also IM clients available for AOL, MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk, as well as the standard BlackBerry Messenger for talking just to other BlackBerry devices. For e-mail, we had the BlackBerry e-mail client set up our Gmail account, which it handled with no trouble or special settings from us. We liked that the e-mail app could download pictures to display in line with messages, but we wished it could handle full-HTML e-mails as well, as Windows Mobile and other smartphones can.