BlackBerry Storm 9500 Overview

BlackBerry, having secured the corporate business market with the Blackberry Storm 9500, is now looking at entering the touchscreen and the iPhone side of things. They have always produced a reasonable quality keyboard but if you are used to their product you will find this one a marked improvement. Its touch screen is something new combined with a 3.2-megapixel camera, GPS and many other appealing features.

BlackBerry has designed the Storm with multimedia in mind. The screen gives excellent video and photo quality, while still looking stylish, and the whole unit has a nice rounded feel that fits nicely into the hand. One of the bonuses from the company is the software behind the screen, which works really well, and whether you are using the speakers, headphones or watching videos the sound quality is above the norm.

RIM has a reputation for producing phones that are made for keying in words as in emails, and they come with full QWERTY keyboards. The Storm is packed with all this technology and there is even an app for editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint presentations. The phone supports multi-tasking, conference calls and the maps app links to GPS.

If there is any criticism of the earlier model then this is likely to centre on battery life. Heavy users will find they need daily charges to keep the unit active. Weighing in at 155gms it is the heaviest smartphone on the market. Other than that it combines the business world applications and touchscreen utilities very well to produce a viable competitor to the iPhone.