NOTEBOOK, CELL PHONE AND UMPC REVIEW

The new touchscreen BlackBerry Storm has arrived in shops today

 

After much speculation as to when the BlackBerry Storm is release, Vodafone Group announced the launch of the BlackBerry Storm™ smartphone from Research In Motion (RIM). The BlackBerry Storm is the first ever ‘clickable’ touch screen smartphone and will be available exclusively on Vodafone’s high speed 3G mobile broadband network in Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand from next month. Also, the BlackBerry Storm will be available exclusively on Vodafone in the UK just in time for Xmas, with talk of a November 21st US launch on the Verizon network.
The price of the BlackBerry storm will be $199.99 when you sign a two year contract with Verizon plus you get a great $50 mail-in-rebate.
The BlackBerry Storm smartphone, which is the result of a long term strategic alliance between Vodafone and RIM, takes what customers have come to expect from a BlackBerry® smartphone - a great phone with market leading e-mail, messaging, multi-media and Internet capabilities – and revolutionizes the experience with the introduction of a ground breaking large touch screen and virtual keyboard.

 

 

BlackBerry Storm 

FEATURES

• Coming in a sleek and elegant black design, the BlackBerry Storm smartphone brings together messaging services including email, SMS and MMS in a single in-box and alerts from social networks.

• Offers superb sound quality and a 3.2 MP camera with video capabilities that exploit the screen’s stunning clarity to deliver advanced multi-media performance coupled with Vodafone’s fast and reliable mobile broadband network.

• Enhanced high performance browser which delivers users a high speed web browsing experience, with desktop-style depiction in either portrait or landscape view. The new user interface combines the familiar dedicated “menu” and “escape” keys common to BlackBerry smartphones and adds support for multi-touches, taps and slides allowing the user to easily highlight, scroll, pan and zoom, making navigation fast, easy and intuitive.

• The uniquely tactile 3.25” screen gives users a variety of different sense experiences. Despite its flat surface, users feel the sensation of actually pressing down on virtual keys which also light up when touched. This makes it quick and easy to type texts and emails as well as navigate through the phone’s functions. Customers will also have the choice of using a full QWERTY, SureType® or multi-tap keyboard.

• Display multi-media content and comfortably view attachments as well as read and edit documents by excluding the traditional physical keyboard, more space has been dedicated to the high resolution colour screen.

• The ground-breaking screen with its 480 x 360 pixel resolution display switches from portrait mode to landscape mode as the handset is rotated, while automatically changing the format of the keyboard from multi-tap or RIM’s SureType® to full QWERTY*.

• A wide range of songs and full length videos can be downloaded and enjoyed with the stunning clarity of the smartphone’s screen and its incredible, high quality audio.

• The BlackBerry Storm retains the full functionality and security features of the BlackBerry platform but is also ideal for avid Facebook, MySpace and YouTube users, while Flickr fans will love the ease and speed of directly uploading their pictures seconds after taking them.

• The Storm also has a built-in GPS receiver and a navigation function. The GPS can also be used to automatically geotag photographs taken with the 9500’s camera, which is a 3.2 megapixel unit with autofocus and flash.

• This is a 3G device, the BlackBerry Storm has quad-band GSM and UMTS 2100 with support for HSDPA high-speed data. There’s also a US version, the BlackBerry Storm 9530 which runs on CDMA/EV-DO networks. Neither version of the BlackBerry Storm supports WiFi, which is a serious omission in our view.

• Customers can access all Vodafone’s entertainment and information services including Vodafone Music, Google Maps and Find&Go navigation, and the Vodafone live! portal, whilst also benefiting from a removable battery with excellent talk and standby time, and up to 16GB of exchangeable memory.

It’s quite a hefty device at 155 grams and 113 x 62 x 14mm in size. The large 1400 mAh battery can give up to 5.5 hours talktime and 15 day standby time on 3G, which is impressive.

You can get the Storm from Verizon on Friday 21st of November, just it time for Christmas, oh this release date is for shops, stores and online so finally the BlackBerry Storm will be yours.