BlackBerry Storm 9500 review

After a long delay, the BlackBerry Storm 9500 has finally made its way to the Indian mobile market. Launched earlier in the western market, RIM's new smartphone release was delayed in India due to some security reasons.

Finally, when the device is launched it's offered on three major telecom operators in India - Airtel, Vodafone and Reliance Communications. BlackBerry lovers in India have now different options to choose the Storm device as per the data plans offered by these opertors.

Let's first find out what all this new RIM device has to offer to the users. The BlackBerry Storm 9500 comes with a touchscreen and a 3.25-inch display at 480x360 pixel resolution. The device boasts of a superb touchscreen feature, which is clear bright and responsive.

Other than that, the Storm comes equipped with RIM's SurePress technology, which is at an experimental stage here. With this technology, whenever you tap the screen, it depresses to make the device feel as though you were pressing the real buttons. However, there are few issues with RIM's new SurePress technology. By pressing the screen, you will notice that the top layer moves around, which sometimes feel pretty uncomfortable. Alternatively, the haptic feedback is smoother from our point of view.

It does boast of a large touchscreen and there are extra keys for well-used functions. You can find a call answer and end buttons keys, plus the familiar BlackBerry menu and escape keys on the front panel of the device. Also, there's a mute/un mute and a lock button placed at the very top of the smartphone.

RIM has revamped its existing non-touchscreen operating system and tried to import it to a touchscreen-based solution, which doesn't work well all the time for a touchscreen device. Although the company has now rectified this issue with the new BlackBerry Torch, this first attempt didn't go so smoothly.

Another major drawback this device has got is its slow processing. It's dead slow and many a times the screen takes extra long time to  respond to your commands or pokes. The operating system at the same time is extremely slow to respond to the actions as well. You may find it difficult to use if you are a fast texter as this interface is really not intuitive at all.

However, on the positive aspects, the new BlackBery Storm 9500 is a 3G-enabled smartphone. But at the time of reviewing this device, we couldn't test this feature as 3G services are yet to be rolled out at this part of the world. When this would be made available, only then we we'll be able to tell more about its 3G compatibility. The lack of  Wi-Fi on this device is also a surprising element.

Other than that, you can find inbuilt GPS, BlackBerry Maps and Google Maps on this handset. But there are no India specific maps, which is again surprising for this new generation business phone. Still, you can enjoy loads of social networking tools such as Facebook, Flickr and YouTube with your new BlackBerry Storm 9500.

The smartphone offers a decent 3.2-megapixels camera, which is again not that advanced compared to the other existing smartphones in India. You'll find that the camera quality is not that good. The images are of basic quality and the camera is a little slow to respond too when you try capturing images.

However, you can use the inbuilt GPS feature to geotag your clicked images. Also, the device doesn't offer front-facing camera for video calling. Although, the lack of this feature can be compromised at this time because the front-facing camera can be mostly used on the 3G services for video calling or video chatting..

In short, we can say that the new BlackBerry 9500 Storm appears great in terms of hardware design and user interface. But comparatively, the BlackBerry Torch is a far superior device at this point. It offers plenty of software on board and it also provides POP email services with the usual RIM ease.