Primeras criticas a la BlackBerry Storm

Como ya avanzamos hace unas semanas, el lanzamiento de la nueva BlackBerry Storm no va a dejar indiferente a nadie. Ya se han empezado a escuchar las primeras impresiones acerca de este nuevo gadget de BlackBerry, lanzado para competir con el iPhone y otros dispositivos de HTC.

La principal novedad respecto a las anteriores BlackBerry (Bold, Curve, Pearl) es que no dispone de un teclado de botones como tal si no un touchscreen y funcionalidades más visuales.

Es este teclado de pantalla el que no se adapta al gusto de los antiguos propietarios de BlackBerry según hemos podido comprobar en un artículo publicado en The New York Times. A continuación adjuntamos un extracto (no tendencioso del artículo):

"Here’s a great example of the intelligence that drives RIM: The phones all have simple, memorable, logical names instead of incomprehensible model numbers. There’s the BlackBerry Pearl (with a translucent trackball). The BlackBerry Flip (with a folding design). The BlackBerry Bold (with a stunning design and faux-leather back).
Well, there’s a new one, just out ($200 after rebate, with two-year Verizon contract), officially called the BlackBerry Storm.
But I’ve got a better name for it: the BlackBerry Dud.
The first sign of trouble was the concept: a touchscreen BlackBerry. That’s right — in its zeal to cash in on some of that iPhone touchscreen mania, RIM has created a BlackBerry without a physical keyboard.
Hello? Isn’t the thumb keyboard the defining feature of a BlackBerry? A BlackBerry without a keyboard is like an iPod without a scroll wheel. A Prius with terrible mileage. Cracker Jack without a prize inside.
RIM hoped to soften the blow by endowing its touch screen with something extra: clickiness. The entire screen acts like a mouse button. Press hard enough, and it actually responds with a little plastic click.
As a result, the Storm offers two degrees of touchiness. You can tap the screen lightly, or you can press firmly to register the palpable click.
It’s not a bad idea. In fact, it ought to make the on-screen keyboard feel more like actual keys. In principle, you could design a brilliant operating system where the two kinds of taps do two different things. Tap lightly to type a letter — click fully to get a pop-up menu of accented characters (é, è, ë and so on). Tap lightly to open something, click fully to open a shortcut menu of options. And so on.
Unfortunately, RIM has completely botched the execution.
Where to begin? Maybe with e-mail, the most important function of a BlackBerry. On the Storm, a light touch highlights the key but doesn’t type anything. It accomplishes nothing — a wasted software-design opportunity. Only by clicking fully do you produce a typed letter.
It’s way, way too much work, like using a manual typewriter. (“I couldn’t send two e-mails on this thing,” said one chronic BlackBerry fan in disgust.)
It’s no help that the Storm shows you two different keyboards, depending on how you’re holding the thing (it has a tilt sensor like the iPhone’s).
When you hold it horizontally, you get the full, familiar QWERTY keyboard layout. But when you turn it upright, you get the less accurate SureType keyboard, where two letters appear on each “key,” and the software tries to figure out which word you’re typing.
For example, to type “get,” you press the GH, ER, and TY keys. Unfortunately, that’s also “hey.” You can see the problem. And trying to enter Web addresses is utterly hopeless.
Furthermore, despite having had two years to study the iPhone, RIM has failed to exploit the virtues of an on-screen keyboard. A virtual keyboard’s keys can change, permitting you to switch languages or even alphabet systems within a single sentence. A virtual keyboard can offer canned blobs of text like “.com” and “.org” when it sense that you’re entering a Web address, or offer an @ key when addressing e-mail.
But not on the Storm.
Incredibly, the Storm even muffs simple navigation tasks. When you open a menu, the commands are too close together; even if your finger seems to be squarely on the proper item, your click often winds up triggering something else in the list.
To scroll a list, you’re supposed to flick your finger across the screen, just as on the iPhone. But even this simple act is head-bangingly frustrating; the phone takes far too long to figure out that you’re swiping and not just tapping. It inevitably highlights some random list item when you began to swipe, and then there’s a disorienting delay before the scrolling begins.
There’s no momentum to the scrolling, either, as on the iPhone or a Google phone; you can’t flick faster to scroll farther. Scrolling through a long list of phone numbers, therefore, is exhausting.
Nor is that the Storm’s only delayed reaction. It can take two full seconds for the screen image to change when you turn it 90 degrees, three seconds for a program to appear, five seconds for a button-tap to register. (Remember: To convert seconds into BlackBerry time, multiply by seven.)
In short, trying to navigate this thing isn’t just an exercise in frustration — it’s a marathon of frustration.
Now, I wouldn’t come down this hard on some product — especially one that was so eagerly anticipated, customers lined up at dawn on the day of its release — without getting a second, third and fourth opinion. And I’m telling you, there wasn’t a soul who tried this machine who wasn’t appalled, baffled or both.
And that’s before they discovered that the Storm doesn’t have Wi-Fi. It can’t get onto the Internet using wireless hot spots, like the iPhone or other BlackBerries. Verizon’s high-speed (“3G”) cellular Internet network is now in 258 U.S. cities, but that’s still a far cry from everywhere.
But wait, there’s less. The Storm, as it turns out, has more bugs than a summer picnic. Freezes, abrupt reboots, nonresponsive controls, cosmetic glitches. Way too much “unexpected behavior.”
It’s too bad, too, because behind that disastrous software and balky screen, there’s a very nice phone.
It runs, after all, on Verizon’s excellent cellphone network. If you’re one of the few remaining rich people in this country, you can even use this phone overseas (roaming rates are as high as $5 a minute). The phone features are excellent; calls are loud and clear.
The Storm has voice dialing, copy-and-paste, programmable side buttons and a standard headphone jack. You can open and even edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint files that arrive as mail attachments. Even Mac fans can get in on the action, thanks to a free copy of the Pocket Mac software.
You also get expandable storage; an eight-gigabyte memory card comes in the box. The camera is dog slow, but it has a very good flash, a 2X zoom and a stabilizer; it takes decent, if pale, pictures and movies. The Web browser is the best yet on a BlackBerry: double-tap to zoom, drag a finger to scroll.
There’s even GPS, with turn-by-turn directions as you drive ($10 a month extra). The Storm can show voicemail in an Inbox-like list, like the iPhone does ($3 a month extra). The screen (480 x 360 pixels) is bright and beautiful.
Honestly, though, you’ll probably never get that far. When you look at your typing, slow and typo-ridden, and you consider the dents you’ve made banging your head against the wall, you’ll be grateful that Verizon offers a 30-day return period.
How did this thing ever reach the market? Didn’t anyone at RIM actually try it? Or was everyone involved just too terrified to pull the emergency brake on this train?
Maybe RIM is just overextended. After all, it has just introduced three major new phones — Flip, Bold, Storm — in two months, each with a different software edition. Some quality-control problems are bound to result; the iPhone 3G went through something similar.
The company says that it’s hard at work on a bug-fix software update. Until then, maybe Storm isn’t such a bad name for this phone. After all—it’s dark, sodden and unpredictable".