BlackBerry Storm 9500 review: Berry-go-round

It's not everyday that you see a BlackBerry review on our homepage but it's not like RIM routinely churn out devices like the Storm either. Messaging is still the legendary name but… well… touchscreen is the game. Keeping the business appeal of its siblings, the 9500 Storm sure stands out in the Berry crowd. But it also tries to set itself apart from the other touchscreens by promising a whole new touch experience.

BlackBerry Storm official photos

The Canadian manufacturer RIM is walking an unbeaten path by adding unique clickability to the fluid precision of the capacitive touchscreen technology. The award-winning SurePress screen may not be everyone's cup of coffee but we're not talking teacup either, just yet.

Key features:

• 3.25" 65K-color capacitive touchscreen of 360 x 480 pixel resolution
• A new touchscreen experience thanks to SurePress screen
• Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and 2100 MHz 3G with HSDPA support
• 3.15 MP autofocus camera, LED flash
• BlackBerry OS 4.7
• 624 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM
• Built-in GPS and BlackBerry maps preloaded
• 1 GB internal storage
• Hot-swappable microSD card slot, ships with an 8GB card
• Landscape virtual QWERTY keyboard goes as close to hardware keys as we have seen
• Great build quality
• Solid looks
• 3.5mm standard audio jack
• Bluetooth and USB v2.0
• Really nice web browser
• Document editor
• Excellent audio quality

Main disadvantages:

• No Wi-fi
• Only BlackBerry email support out of the box
• Interface not as quick as competitors
• Chubbier than most touchscreen phones
• Mediocre camera
• No FM radio
• No Flash support
• Fingerprint-prone front panel

Now, this isn't one of those all-about-email BlackBerry reviews where the 9500 Storm gets only compared to its own kind, for the lack of meaningful competition. We are more than confident that the Storm does its BlackBerry thing just fine, so instead of focusing on it we'll try to give a different view of the device. Our objective is to see how it fares against all those other "regular" touchscreens that have the crowd's attention: Apples, Renoirs, Omnias, Diamonds and the likes.

BlackBerry Storm 9500 views

Well, our approach may seem like comparing apples to oranges but only at first sight. The first thing about the Storm 9500 is the attempt to reach beyond the core group of diehard BlackBerry users. We're talking stealing some market here, so if Blackberry are playing to win, they should well be ready to take some hard beating too. First-rate email is nice and all, but the Storm will only be as good as its user interface and multimedia. For the rest (which means WLAN too) there's Curve and Bold.

The BlackBerry Storm 9500 next to the Samsung i900 Omnia and Apple iPhone 3G

Nokia N97 will be unleashed on the 31 March in UK at 480 GBP

An online retailer has started accepting pre-orders for the upcoming Nokia N97. There's a specific release date now and a price tag to match the N97 rich feature set. We bet all Nokia fans will rejoice to find out that their dream device will hit the stores in less than three months.

The QWERTY-and-touch-enabled Nokia N97 is supposed to hit the shelves at the last day of March.

The price tag of 480 GBP (540 euro or 720 US dollars) for the dream-come-true phone sounds quite nice and is actually a tad lower than the officially announced suggested price of 550 euro before taxes or subsidies. We've never seen a Nokia phone introductory price go lower than the initial expectations, so it's either the world financial meltdown talking here or the seller is just pulling our leg.