Hands on: Blackberry Storm

Vodafone were demo-ing early models of the Blackberry Storm in their HQ today - so I took a few minutes to check out what all the fuss is about. I should say upfront that I am already a Blackberry fan and owner of a BB Curve.

First off - it is thicker and heavier that the iPhone, and will probably cause a few creases in the frequent flyers suit line.

For controls - it uses the familiar 4 button layout standard to the Blackberry range. But the feature I was most curious to try out is the Click-through screen. Contrary to my expectations, RIM seem to have pulled off a coup here, it is very intuitive to use and a big improvement on the touch screen typing experience. It has a tactile feel, requiring just the right amount of pressure to depress and responding with a satisfying click.

And the click through screen is a critical feature because the screen is noticeably smaller than other touchscreens, hence the keyboard is more compact. To further minimise the mis-typing problems common to most touchscreen keyboards, RIM have designed the keyboard to 'glow' around the location of your finger before you depress the screen. The theory being that you can see what key you are about to press before applying pressure to the screen, the only trade off being is that it slows the typing process. Based on 5 minutes use I made slighty more mistakes than I would typically make on my Blackberry Curve but after more practice I reckon the error rate would be similar. The bottom line - still not suitable for sending a long email but ideal for shorter, quick fire responses.

On my Curve I have found the web browser experience to be a major let down - clunky and virtually unusable, my only internet use has been via the various widgets I have downloaded. The new browser on the Storm is light years ahead and fully HTML enabled. However it is still not as good as the iPhone's Safari experience and I could not help noticing that any embedded script would slow down page rate considerably. The Storm does have the gravity sensor to ensure that the screen rotates smoothly according to how it is being held, but it lacks the finger controlled zoom in/out function of the iPhone.

On a brief inspection, the O/S seems to work well - a nice clean white on black menu. As with other Blackberrys, some menu functions are accessed via the logo button - a feature that I have always found to be counter-intuitive. The camera has been upgraded to 3 MP - but this is clearly not designed to be a lead feature. The side controls (never popular on other BBs) have been simplified to a volume control.

From a business perspective - this launch is a major play for Vodafone - they have secured exclusive UK operator rights for the lifetime of the device (it was developed by RIM in conjunction with Vodafone). The iPhone has been surprisingly popular with business users, and this is a clear step to up the stakes. It will benefit from the large Blackberry user base who may prefer to stick with an OS that they are familiar with. However, there are no concrete pricing or release dates yet - if anyone has any insight on this I would be very curious...

With the recent spate of touchscreen device launches the market looks set for intensive competition over the next 12-24 months...