Blackberry Storm vs Apple iPhone

Ok, I’ve had my Storm for 4 weeks, and I wanted to give everyone an update. First, what I like: I like the keypad and how when you put your finger on a letter it highlights, but doesn’t click the key (like the iPhone does). I very rarely have to retype e-mails. The copy and paste from e-mails is very handy! E-mail works like it should work (except for one issue I mention below).

What do I hate about it? The camera and video camera are unreliable and buggy. The iPhone blows the Blackberry Storm out of the water with their camera. I went to my daughters play today, and I managed to get one photo and maybe a video. I don’t really know because the Storm kept locking up, giving me unrecoverable errors, and then it rebooted itself. So I spent most of the play trying to take a simple picture. I really hate how when you take a picture you have to choose what to do with it, hey RIM, I just want to save it! I’ll go back later and delete the ones that were blurry (and there were many!). I think I managed to record 1 minute of video, which took up 4MB, half of the memory card! So keep this in mind, if your 8MB memory card is empty, you may get as much as 2 minutes of video. My wife with her iPhone was able to flawlessly take 20-30 pictures compared to my one!

The other thing I have noticed with the Storm, is when you land in a different city, it quite often reboots itself. This is a real pain, since it ties up the Storm for 5 minutes. When I arrive at an airport, I like to see my e-mails, its pretty simple.

My wife an I arrived in Scottsdale and we both proceeded to use the map software to find a restaurant. Guess, who’s was faster? The iPhone blew the Storm out of the water. She had found the location, the GPS had a pin where we were located with a route indicated before I was able to even find the restaurant. The mapping software was so bad with the Storm, that I downloaded Google Maps for Blackberry just so I could use it. The iPhone’s mapping is a much more intuitive operating system, the Storms is akward and lacks common sense.

So my updated review of the Storm vs iPhone is this: If multimedia (listening to music, taking photo’s, finding restaurants) and having lots of cool apps is important to you, get the iPhone. The Storm offers better e-mail, and internet viewing size (the internet browser sucks). I just hope the Blackberry gets an update for the Storm released very soon, otherwise it could be game over for the Storm.

Jeff Russell