US$ 406 US$ 299.00

The all new Blackberry Storm 9500 has taken us with quite a lot of surprises. The new touch-screen only, no physical keyboard design is one big change, and the new touch-enabled operating system is very refreshing. Does it have enough to bear the Blackberry legacy?

Let’s find out now.The package is full of stuff: the phone, a battery, a travel charger, a handsfree, a CD-rom and a User’s guide. RIM is nice enough to put a simple leather case in the bundle, but I bet any serious user will go for a more functional case. Also included is a “cleaning cloth”, which is necessitated by the fingerprint-magnet surface of the Blackberry Storm 9500.

The Blackberry Storm 9500 looks a lot like the touch-screen phones on the market. The 3.25” (480 x 360) screen dominates much of the front surface, leaving just enough space for 4 physical buttons.

From left to right: answer, menu, back and reject buttons. There are times when I miss a 4-way D-pad when I was using the Blackberry – particularly so while I was navigating through the menus.

The camera has 3.2MP with auto-focus and flash, which is quite modest by today’s standard.

The metallic back cover lacks friction but since the body is quite wide it’s hard to drop the phone.

RIM knows how embarrassing it is to hear your own phone ringing in an important meeting. The top 2 hidden buttons are here to prevent such tragedy: the top left button locks the screen while the top right button changes phone profiles.

On the right side of the phone lie a 3.5mm phone jack, volume rocker and the shutter button. It seems that the Blackberry Storm 9500 is one step closer to an entertainment phone with the 3.5mm jack, full-featured music/video player and the Blackberry Media Sync (for syncing with iTunes in PC).

On the left side of the phone are the mini USB port (non-standard) and the voice dialing button.

The built-in accelerometer allows you to view the screen in portrait, clockwise landscape or anti-clockwise landscape. Changing to any of the landscape mode toggles the full QWERTY keyboard (as opposed to the 2-letter-in-1-key keyboard in the portrait mode).

The virtual QWERTY keyboard is remarkably different from those on the Apple iPhone 3G or windows mobile phones. Press the screen softly will “brighten up” the key, but it doesn’t recognize any input. Press the screen fully and you will notice a click, and the key will be lit up and input is recognized. While RIM claims that the click can help you improve accuracy, I can’t give too much credit to this statement. The keys are still too small for touch-typing. Any long-term Blackberry users will likely miss the physical QWERTY keyboard a lot, but if you are jumping from Apple iPhone 3G or Windows Mobile phones, you may feel it is pretty good already.

The on-screen dial pad is huge and easy to use but there is little space for displaying the numbers.

The Blackberry Storm 9500 leaves us something to be desired. At this price, it is hard to justify the lack of GPS and Wi-Fi. HSDPA, 3.5mm phone jack and the new interface bring this Blackberry a lot closer to an entertainment phone, but it does so by sacrificing productivity. The virtual QWERTY keyboard is far from a replacement of the physical one and the system is quite unresponsive at times. If you are not a die-hard Blackberry fans, my recommendation goes to the HTC Touch HD, which is better in almost every aspect and costs just as much. Of course if you love Blackberrys, the Blackberry Storm 9500 is hard to miss – just keep it away from the rest of Blackberry’s, they will dwarf the newcomer.

BlackBerry Storm 9500 Video Review