Storm

Shine did not give a good description of the half, she is the most beautiful and girly half of Sin and Shine. Anyways, I thought of writing something too. Since I can’t really write about food, shopping, social issues (yeah, I know), the only thing coming to my mind is something I recently bought and stuck with.

For months, I have been out it in the market looking for a phone. Not just any phone. I was looking for a phone which is sturdy, sophisticated and stylish. Basically, a phone which reflects my personality and character.

When I saw Steve Jobs announcing on CNN about the phone Apple is coming out, I thought that’s the phone I have been waiting for. But just two weeks earlier I bought a SonyEricsson P990. So, I decided to wait a couple of more months. Then, when I was about to buy the iPhone, Jobs came out with the new model and again a new model. And all of a sudden, iPhone is everywhere. Then I thought I would carry something different.

When I caught a glimpse of the BlackBerry Storm, I threw away my Palm Treo and bought the Storm in an instance. So, now let’s talk about the phone.
One of the brilliant features of the Storm is its touchscreen that sets it apart from the rest of the touchscreen phones in the market.
RIM maintains that for years it has steered clear of touchscreens not because it could not make them, but because its core business customers feared that they would accidentally send an email or text or make a call just by moving around the screen.
The 5800 gets around this problem by demanding double tapping to activate commands. The Storm, however, has a touchscreen that effectively floats a fraction of a millimeter above a whole bank of sensors so when you scroll down to an icon you want you just press down on the screen in the right place. It gives the sort of physical click that any BlackBerry user will recognise from the trackball on previous devices. Its simple but remarkably effective.
The Storm has many of the features people have come to expect in the post-iPhone world. Turn it through 90 degrees and the screen flips from portrait to landscape. Web pages are crisp and clean and easily navigated by dragging them around. Double tap on an area and it zooms in. If you want to click on a link you can move a cursor around a screen with your finger - cleverly the cursor is set slightly away from your finger so you can see what you are doing, the same goes for the cursor when typing emails if you need to go back and make corrections - or if you have zoomed in, you can just 'click' on the link.
One Storm-specific variant is to place two fingers on the screen - one at the start of some text and one at the end - which highlights the text so it can be copied and pasted into an email, text message or instant message.
One potential surfing drawback is that the Storm does not have Wi-Fi - a technology of which Vodafone is no fan - but with HSDPA it should operate fine... provided the company can keep its network up to scratch.
The 3.2 megapixel camera is better than the camera in the iPhone - and it has a flash like the Nokia 5800 - while its video capture rate is even better than the Finnish effort.
The device's music player will play pretty much everything - except tracks purchased via iTunes, of course - as will its video player. And you get to plug your own headphones into it. Hopefully Vodafone will ship it with a fairly chunky SD card, at least bigger than the 2GB card which T-Mobile plans for the G1.
Being a BlackBerry, of course, email is very important and it can integrate 10 different accounts into one inbox and take push email from all the major web accounts such as GMail, Hotmail etc. Obviously it will sync with Outlook, Exchange or Lotus Notes et al because it is, after all, a BlackBerry, which gives it a major advantage over the G1.
When it comes to integrating all the different ways that a user can communicate, however, it does lack a certain panache. Other devices - especially the iPhone, with visual voicemail, and the 5800, with its clever use of its contact books to store all your communications with individual people - do so-called integrated communications better than the Storm.
Oh and if you get completely lost it has those two friendly green and red buttons on the bottom. It is, after all, a phone...
Having integrated all your email accounts into one inbox and got ready to start editing everyone's attachments and uploading great video, the last thing you want to be doing is trying to work out how much data you have used each month so you can avoid a massive bill. A badly constructed tariff could kill this phone. But if done right, the Storm will ruffle a few feathers over in Cupertino.

- Sin