Final BlackBerry Storm Review Roundup

As dark clouds roll in overhead and winds begin to pick up the sound of thunder crackles all around… not really, but Friday’s BlackBerry Storm release seems to be all anyone wants to talk about today. Now, I know we did a review roundup for the Storm already, but they were all preliminary reviews from the beginning of October. Below are links to some more detailed and recent reviews. Here is a summary excerpt taken from the Boy Genius Report that really got me thinking.

“The whole point of a BlackBerry and what BlackBerry users bragged about to their co-workers, friends and family to was that a BlackBerry was straight-forward and completely uncomplicated. The Storm complicates things. There’s not one thing you can do faster on a Storm than you can on a Bold. Typing is mediocre at best, and to tell you the truth, it really does get tiring at times. It’s not something we can bang out 250-word emails on like we can on every other QWERTY BlackBerry in the past. It hinders your mobile device experience, in our opinion, if you are a raging lunatic on your BlackBerry. It just doesn’t compare to the BlackBerry Bold. At least not in the current incarnation…we’re sure these things are going to fly off the shelves at Verizon stores on Friday, we just have a feeling there will also be a lot of returns.”

This offers an interesting opinion, but I can’t help but think if it’s referring to an audience that RIM wasn’t really targeting with the Storm. RIM seems to be trying to push the Storm as a more consumer-friendly device. Business users who need long emails or want function over fashion can still have phones like the Bold and I’m sure RIM will continue to push smartphones with standard QWERTY’s. The Storm was meant to bring RIM into a new consumer base of 15-30-year-old, mainstream users, which I think it does well. While there are a few hiccups with the click-screen implementation, the Storm does a good job at bringing BlackBerry’s incredibly solid back-end email capabilities and adds consumer appeal. Sure the mainstream consumer may not care as much about the SPAM filtering as much as a business user, but they’ll appreciate it nonetheless and it becomes another key reason why they like the Storm better than an iPhone.

Of course, you should make sure this is something you want before putting down your hard earned cash and two years of your mobile life so check out below for some more reviews and be sure to stop by a store and test one out for yourself if you think this might be the smartphone for you.

• The Boy Genius Report
• Engadget
• Gizmodo
• PhoneArena
• Phonescoop
• CNN