Other annoyoing issues are the dropping of calls because of the network, I have used other older models of Blackberry and Nokia handsets and this doesn’t happen. After various hours on calls to tech guys I worked out that the 3G signal is to blame. This is because there is no complete coverage of 3G, so when the 3G bounces low the phone tries to go into 2G mode and drops your call. The only solution to this problem was to switch the phone into 2G mode through ‘Network Options’ menu. This then rectified that problem completely. Since I don’t ever use 3G this doesn’t bother me, I’m well over the frustration of trying to use Youtube anyway so I use 2G and finally I got a phone that can actually be used as a phone!

One issue that drives me crazy is when the battery goes nearly flat I lose the radio signal thus can’t make or recieve calls, texts or email, you might ask ‘What’s the problem, just charge the phone’, it’s not that easy, you place the phone on charge and takes, I’m not exaggerating, 10 (ten) whole minutes to switch my signal back on. 10 frustrating little minutes of waiting before I can call the person back because the stupid Storm will not switch on.

My advice is dont get this phone, even if it’s given to you for free with a cherry on top. I stupidly signed up to a 18 month contract of which I have 6 months left and I can’t wait to get rid of this piece of junk.

Thanks for enduring my ramble and hope my advice helps you.

Andreas.

Oh…but the camera quality is pretty good – if it ain’t locked up!!!!

Here are some of the main concerns. These concerns have been vetted by at least 6 users in my department alone. OS upgrades help matters, but not much. All of the users are attempting to get different blackberry models as a replacement for recently received Storms. Other than the person responsible for purchasing our company phones, I have yet to find anyone who rates this phone above average.

1. When making international calls, more than half the time, a received or previously made call cannot be automatically redialled. You have to reenter the “+” and country code.

2. You will be constantly hearing “Say a command” every time you pick up the phone because of the positioning of the side buttons.

3. Accelerometer (device to switch between portrait and landscape views) is incredibly slow.

4. Device often locks up in portrait or landscape mode regardless of device position

5. Device often freezes, sometimes to the point of having to remove battery to reset.

6. It is impossible to type quickly or accurately. Even with familiarity, typing efficiency is about 60-70% of any standard phone. Accuracy is about 300% worse.

7. Positioning, cutting and pasting (i.e. any edit functions) are virtually impossible with the touch screen.

8. Picture taking is impossibly slow, particularly with flash

9. Keypad is normally not there when you want it, and there blocking info when you don’t want it.

10. Keypad functions poorly if you like to use one hand to type “across” the qwerty keypad. You will be constantly selecting an adjacent letter.

I was a Blackberry user for 6 years and a Verizon Wireless customer for over 10 years. Yesterday I activated my iPhone after switching and I cannot be more emphatic, you do not know what you are missing until you try it, in order words. The Blackberry Storm is an absolute piece of crap compared to an iPhone. It’s not that the iPhone is cooler looking (it is), it comes down to performance and support for me. I went through 3 Storms in 6 months and I would have had to buy my 4th, however I demanded that Verizon move me to another device (anything other than the Storm) without a charge, they refused. My latest Storm dropped a call every 3 – 5 minutes. The sound quality was terrible; impossible to use without a headset/mic. The camera was so slow that most pictures were blurry. And the keyboard, that special touch click screen is supposed to make typing easier, I guess nobody tested it out with real people. Then of course the fact that using the keyboard and device is painfully slow, it’s so sluggish.

I complained about the device to Verizon many times; they would not replace it with a different device. I told them I was dropping service for the iPhone and the Verizon guy said I would come back to Verizon. My initial tests are in, the iPhone is far superior, better sound, lightning fast interface, great touch screen, great options, & web is faster. I’ve heard Verizon say they had better web app speed, but what good is it if it takes a full minute longer to get to the app. Go iPhone!!!!!!! Steer clear of the Storm!

The battery software is obviously wrong as NO WAY will it standby for 15 days. I have had 130 hours and not used at all, NOT 352 as is claimed. On some web pages attempting to ‘click’ a link only makes it Zoom in on the page!

I only hope RIM / VODAFONE get a grip and get out a corrective software up-grade to resolve its many ‘silly’ problems soon, as it could be such an ACE phone.

Good job over all. Bravo!

Actually I like my Storm much better now that I smashed it against the dashboard and I finally succeeded in breaking it beyond repair. I have had it for about 5 months and I paid plenty for it. That said, the satisfaction of smashing it made it all worthwhile. For starters, the interface has a response I feel I can only describe as wading through an 18″ deep lake of frozen molasses. Want to play games on it? Forget about it. Sound is weak and scratchy. Voice recognition is poor. It’s chunky and heavy. All that aside, that isn’t the major problem. Shortly after I got it, it sarted rebooting multiple times per day (like 10). Bad enough, but on top of that, it takes 5-10 minutes to recycle. 10 hours of tech support (really!) with Verizon improved it to about 2 reboots every 3 days. Unfortunately, over time, it became worse again – much worse – finally rebooting every time someone tried to call: 1 ring – 1 vibration – reboot. Oh yeah – and it didn’t save the number either so I had no idea who called. After it did this to me about 15 times in a row over a period of 3 days or so, it hit the dashboard. FYI Verizon AND Blackberry customer service was abysmal. This happened 2 days ago (4/14/09). I bought an iPhone. It’s killer. I love it. For the record, I’ve been using cell phones since they weighed pounds, came in bags, and air time was $2 a minute. I wasn’t born yesterday and haven’t smashed anything since I pounded a keyboard when the PC ate my spreadsheet and cost me 4 hours of work – I think that was back in ’87.

As of this writing, Blackberry has yet to upgrade the operating system and it is 100% a Blackberry problem. These are in no way ready for prime time and should never have been rushed to the market.

If you’re a masochist and like being tortured, this is definitely the phone for you.

Else, if you really want a useful, elegant, stable, and smooth as silk touchpad phone, then do what I did, suck it up and buy an iPhone.

Consider yourself warned.

Talking on the phone

To be fair, I believe the Storm suffers the same issues as other non-flip phones of the same size. In order to hear someone, I can hold the phone in a normal position to my ear. But in order for someone to hear me clearly, I must shift the phone down so the microphone is closer to my mouth, and since the speaker is then far from my ear I cannot hear if someone is trying to say something in reply to me. This means that there can never be a true 2-way conversation. Now, I know there are those that will say: “People shouldn’t be trying to talk while you’re talking anyway – that’s just rude.” But the fact of the matter is that it happens to everyone and is often a normal progression of conversation. I’ve never had this problem with any flip-phone I’ve ever had. Of course, I’m sure using a Bluetooth device is also an alternative, but I don’t always carry one with me and even so that’s not a fix for the problem, it’s an inconvenient workaround. Big difference.

The other major problem I have with actually being able to talk on the Storm is with the touch screen. During a conversation a menu screen is displayed with buttons for Speaker, Mute, Flash, and Add Participant. A couple of these buttons change based on whether you’re already on speaker or if you have another person conferenced in already. While on a call, if the phone is pressed ever so slightly to my face just a bit too hard, I may end up activating any of these buttons accidentally. I can’t tell you how embarrassed I’ve been when having personal conversations and my face ends up pressing the Speaker button for all to hear within several yards of me. Or when I accidentally press Mute and the person on the other end thinks I’m ignoring them when I’m actually responding, believing I’m participating in the conversation. And don’t get me started on clicking the Flash button with my face accidentally.

The thing I perhaps like most about the Storm during a conversation is that it seems to cancel out my background noise pretty well. Other people can hear me pretty clearly while I’m talking even if I have fairly loud background noise, which I frequently do at work. But considering that I have to move the phone down to my mouth to talk into the mic so people can hear me, this wasn’t much of a surprise.

Features

The Storm is a neat gadget. It can do all sorts of things, and it’s really a pretty cool device. That being said, here is my take on some features that I have come to expect from even much less expensive devices that are lacking in the Storm.

Delete All – This feature should be available at every menu location where it is possible to have a lot of entries. The main locations for this are SMS, the Call Log, Messages, any of the Media subfeatures (Music, Videos, etc.), even Contacts. The ability to delete 150 or so SMS messages all at once, instead of one-at-a-time, is invaluable! Just ask me if I’m sure I want to do it to make sure I know what I’m doing…

Add SMS sender to Contacts – There is currently no option to add someone’s number from a text or SMS message to your contacts, or update an existing contact. When people change their numbers and send a text with their new number it’s nice to be able to just use the text message to add/update their number.

Call recording – There are many situations where recording your conversation with someone else is useful. I understand the legality issues of “wire-tapping”, but there are many other phones out there that will at least record what the other person on the line is saying. I don’t see any reason this nifty little gadget can’t do the same.

Typing – What can I say? I just can’t type as fast on that on-screen keyboard as I can with a button keyboard. And my accuracy is atrocious now.

Other Issues

While the touch-and-click rotating screen is perhaps a revolutionary and useful feature, I’ve found it has its serious bugs. Before the release of the newer OS, the accelerometer was extremely slow and clunky. That issue seems to be getting better, but I still have other problems.

As I mentioned above, the touch screen is too touchy during a conversation. But that’s not the only thing. Sometimes the screen goes blank during a call – no menu options at all. You can still click the screen and push buttons that should be there, the buttons just don’t display.

Or how about the fact that, for some reason, the screen rotates during a phone call and goes on speaker. When this happens there is no button option to take the call off speaker, and no option to do so even when you press the Menu button. It’s gymnastics to try to get the screen back to Portrait mode, let alone take it off speaker.

Let’s talk about GPS and Wi-Fi for a minute. I read the specs for the Storm before I purchased it so I never expected it to have Wi-Fi. Verizon’s 3G network has been great for web browsing. I can understand, and have indeed experienced, instances where Wi-Fi would have been nice, but lack of it hasn’t really effected my overall productivity yet. And we all know that Verizon loves to make you pay for VZNavigator. While use of Google Maps would be an excellent thing, again, I knew going into the purchase that Verizon isn’t really wont to unlock the GPS functionality entirely. Another “nice-to-have”, but isn’t really necessary for functionality.

So….

The other reviews I’ve seen have extolled the Storm’s technology and it really is a revolutionary gadget. In terms of moving technology forward, I believe Blackberry is taking large steps. And no new technology comes without the price of learning from a market testing trial-and-error period. We have to learn to expect that new advances will always come with some period of time before the technology can be perfected. But we must continue to make advances.

That being said, functionality should not be sacrificed for the sake of a few neat new things. If a device is not functional it is useless for its intended purpose. The Blackberry has traditionally always been more than just a phone. And for most of the features that it contains other than a phone it works pretty well. The camera, the music player, the LCD screen for video playback, the Docs-to-Go and email features all prove the device’s versatility and work pretty well. But the phone functionality of the device is extremely lacking and has a long way to go before I can consider it appropriate for my needs.

Do yourself a favor and PASS on this one.