4 days with my BlackBerry Storm

January 23, 2009 in BlackBerry
Tags: issues, review, sync

BlackBerry Storm

What day is today? Oh, it’s Friday. It’s been a blur of a week, you see. I’ve been caught up in BlackBerry madness. On Tuesday, a historic day, the same day Barack Obama was sworn in to office, I went out did something equally historic. I went and purchased a BlackBerry Storm instead of an iPhone 3G, much to the dismay of many of my friends. Not to mention my own surprise. Me, a die hard Mac user, is NOT getting an Apple device, but a BlackBerry? How has it all turned out, you might ask? Well, after four days playing with my BlackBerry Storm, let me tell you.

What I got:

- BlackBerry Storm 9530 with Telus
- an included 8GB SD card preloaded with a sampler of music and videos from Canadian bands (nice touch)
- a BlackBerry silicone skin
- a Jawbone earpiece

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User Experience:

I happen to be a Mac user, but I also realize that RIM hasn’t released their Desktop Manager for OSX yet. Luckily I have VMWare Fusion running XP, as well as a box with Windows 7 Beta on it. Just because I am kind of crazy, I decided to use the Windows 7 box to set up my BlackBerry. The software installed fine, and I was able to do an initial search for new software, and it updated my OS and applications to the latest versions. That happened without a hitch.

The touch click screen is not bad. It takes some getting used to, but for the most part it works. I can see why people feel it slows them down, because you do have to be more deliberate in pushing down on the screen.

The speed of the unit is a little less than… well, it should be faster. I’ve heard that the newest leaked OS for the Storm improves the UI speed quite a lot, so I’m looking forward to the next official release. The speed becomes an issue because sometimes you will have pressed or selected an option, and nothing happens. Or at least you don’t think anything is happening, and then you press again, or you press something else. Well, when the Storm finally does its thing, all those extra presses and pushes really kind of mess things up. So I’ve learned that if something doesn’t happen right away, just wait a few seconds. Maybe it’s getting email in the background, or an IM, or syncing my calendar.

Pristine cleanliness factor:

I am of two minds when it comes to gadgets. Either I want them to be pristine, with nary a scratch or smudge, or I don’t care and just use and abuse them. In this case, I went with the pristine. As the sales person was activating the phone, I had him put on the silicone wrapper over top of the protective plastic sheeting that you’re supposed to peel off. It has remained that way up till this point, because I am awaiting my skins from bestskinsever.com to arrive.

I will say that silicone rubber is a dust magnet, or maybe my pockets are too linty. Either way, I wound up vacuuming off dust by the second day. Note that because the screen floats, there is a gap between the screen and the edge, where small particles can get stuck. I think that as soon as it’s released, I’m getting an otterbox defender case, which will cover the Storm completely. Yes, pristine has its price.

Email:

It’s awesome. I set up three gmail accounts and it is literally instantaneous when an email comes in, the BlackBerry has it. What else can I say.

Typing:

Yes, it’s true. QWERTY only in landscape, and SureType in Portrait. SureType has two letters per button, and as you type it predicts what word you are trying to spell out and predictively enters it for you. Or it shows you a list of words that match. In either case, it works OK, but QWERTY sure would be nicer. As it turns out, RIM is listening, and a new feature added in the latest leaked OS is just that, a QWERTY keyboard in portrait orientation. Sweet.

Web Browsing:

I haven’t done too much browsing on it yet, but I did go to a few sites just to check it out. It’s functional, but I think that Safari on the iPhone beats it in this regard. I did install Opera Mini just to try it, but I haven’t really tested it out.

Media playing:

I was able to get some downloaded TV shows to play on the BlackBerry Storm using the provided Roxio Media Manager software. It’s a very basic program that allows you to manually drag and drop files from your computer to the BlackBerry. If it’s a video file, it will convert it first and then copy it over. I found that an episode of 30 Rock took about 12 minutes to convert, which is pretty slow in my opinion, but it works. The iTunes playlist transfer program wouldn’t install on Windows 7 Beta at first, but after I switched it to launch in Vista Compatibility mode and Run as Administrator, that seemed to let it install. Starting the program often resulted in an error message, but sometimes it would launch, and while it was running, it did as advertised, which is transfer iTunes playlists and music to the BlackBerry Storm. I suspect this is a Windows 7 Beta issue and not an issue with the sotware, I have yet to try the same thing on my XP installation.

Mac sync:

Here’s where things get interesting. I am using iCal and Address Book on OS X. I wanted to find a wireless solution for syncing both of those things to the BlackBerry, to emulate the functionality of mobileme and an iPhone. So I discover that Google Calendar and contacts will sync with BlackBerry using Google Sync, provided by Google. So then the question is, can iCal and Address Book sync with Google?

Spanning Sync to the rescue! With this third party application running on my Mac, I am promised syncing of iCal calendars with Google calendars, and contact syncing. And it works. This is a good thing. (And if you want Spanning Sync for $5 off, click here!)

But then Google Sync tried to sync my contacts, and it was buggy, with one contact (my wife, actually) being repeated multiple times at the top of the list. And when I went to delete it, the entire contact list deleted. Not cool.

At this point, I’m not sure if its Google Sync or the Contacts app on the BlackBerry that’s to blame. So I resorted to trying to sync my OS X Address Book with the BlackBerry over a cable, instead of trying to do it wirelessly.

The software that RIM provides for Mac users is PocketMac, which is a third party solution that RIM is providing for free. That’s the good part. The bad part is that for the Storm, at least, it doesn’t recognize it as a device that can take iTunes or iPhoto files, so that part is useless. I have only been trying to use it to sync my address book, and for the most part it works, except that it skipped some contacts for some reason or another. Very strange.

I’m still hoping to achieve wireless sync of my calendars and contacts, but I’ll settle for the calendar part for now. At least my contacts don’t change as often, so once I get them on there, I’m leaving it alone.

Voice Dial:

I’m very impressed with voice dialing on the BlackBerry Storm. If you say in the number you want to call, even really quickly, it deciphers it! Amazing.

Summary:

So far, my biggest concern has been the contact sync. Everything else seems to work as advertised, but I’m not entirely sure what’s happening with the contacts. I’ll keep working on it to come up with some solution.
I like having a big screen on my device to watch TV shows, that’s really handy. And the email functionality is killer. So I’m pretty happy with it. I’m also positive about the fact that RIM is pushing out beta updates at an alarming rate, which to me means that they are very concerned with fixing what’s wrong with the device. It’s comforting to know that these issues CAN be fixed in software, and they WILL be fixed eventually.