BlackBerry Storm Review

We recently had a chance to go hands-on with Verizon Wireless' Storm, the first BlackBerry to feature a full touchscreen.

The Storm is drop-dead gorgeous: it took a lot of self control not to pocket the Storm during our meeting and head for the border with it. Once crossing into another country, we would have been just fine with service. That's because the Storm supports both GSM and CDMA networks, as well as Verizon Wireless' EV-DO Rev. A network in the United States, and HSDPA connectivity in Europe and Asia.

The Storm measures 4.4 x 2.4 x 0.55-inches, just slightly fatter than the iPhone which measures a similar 4.5 x 2.4 x 0.48 inches in size, and also features an accelerometer, so most menus can be viewed in either landscape or horizontal mode. The back of the device has a switchable metal lid with three available colors: black, dark blue, and charcoal.

It's loaded with BlackBerry OS 4.7, which looks different on the Storm than on the Bold or Pearl Flip because it's optimized for the touchscreen and accelerometer.

An Impressive Touch Screen
During our hands-on, we were stunned by the beautiful 480 x 360 3.26-inch display, which features RIM's ClickThrough technology. ClickThrough lets you depress any portion of the screen to make a selection so it feels like there's actually a button below your finger. RIM's CEO Mike Lazaridis told us this is possible thanks to mechanical switch suspension below the surface of the display that lets each press feel like a separate button.

It took a bit to get used to QWERTY typing with ClickThrough, though, because we are so used to lightly touching the keyboards on touchscreen phones (such as the iPhone), but the Storm actually lets you push down on the keys. We found it to be as, if not more, accurate than the iPhone's keyboard and it supports a similar auto-correct feature. You can touch and hold a letter for additional letters specific to a language, like for example. When in vertical mode, the Storm displays a SureType keyboard like that found on the BlackBerry Pearl.

The Storm also supports multi-tapping for highlighting text. You can simply spread your fingers around a paragraph and push down to highlight the whole area of text, and then you can copy/paste that text elsewhere; a feature the iPhone still doesn't support.

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