gdgt

It is obvious with this phone that RIM's goal was to quickly come out with a product to compete with the iPhone in the touch screen smart phone marketplace.
The major down fall of this phone came with two costly errors, poor choice of using a mushy 'click screen' to differentiate from the iPhone, and pushing the device out of the door too early with terribly buggy software.

Hardware:
As with all recent Blackberry's RIM built a very solid hardware device, with one glaring mistake. The device contains a powerful processor, a user replaceable battery, a good 3.2MP auto focus camera, and a microSD slot. All very good things... then there is the decision to go with the mushy 'click screen', its one of those ideas that sounds good on paper from a designer but when put into practice just doesn't work. I've been using a Storm for 4 months now and I've gone well past the point where i am comfortable enough with the keyboard that it actually significantly hinders my typing speed. Imagine trying to type on a normal desktop keyboard where all the keys are connected together and you have to wait for one key to pop back up to hit the next... yea doesn't sounds like a good typing experience... it isn't.

Software:
Here is where I think the main issues with the phone are. It is obvious to me (as a software developer) that the firmware for the Storm was severely rushed and likely contain some serious underlying structural problems. To me it looks like RIM grabbed their latest OS version and told a group of developers to slap a touch screen interface on top of the OS. It obviously still isn't working right, after 4 software updates to this device I still regularly (more then once a day) do a battery reset because the phone frezzes and is totally unresponsive, on top of that more then half the time when i receive a phone call my storm will buzz once and then freeze on the call screen not allowing me to pick up the call... this PHONE doesn't even ANSWER CALLS!! I'm not going to even get into the issues I get with memory leaking of some of the RIM apps, and the overall unresponsiveness to touch input.

The only positives i see with this software is the ability to switch through apps, its just like using alt-tab on a mac/windows. works well, only if i wasn't using this feature most of the time to hunt down the apps slowing down my phone and closing them...The browser is also Ok, nothing special. RIM really needs to migrate to a WebKit browser for the Storm 2 and rebuild the core operating system to support multi-touch or they are totally done in the touch screen smart phone marketplace.

Conclusion
RIM really screwed this one up, they need to rethink their approach for the next version (looks like they have already got rid of the 'clicky screen'), or they should just give up on this market and focus on the amazing QWERTY smartphones they make. I'll likely be picking up a Palm Pre in the next couple months when Bell Mobility in Canada finally comes out with it (hurry up already...), but the BlackBerry Tour is sparking my interest...