[Technology Tuesday] – An Honest Look at the Blackberry Storm

I don't think I'd want a tiger staring back at me on MY Blackberry...

I don’t get excited about gadgets too often these days – they come out far too frequently, and they’re often too expensive to be worth my while. But as I began to experience some frustration with my Palm Treo 650 smartphone, I also found myself growing enamored with the Blackberry Storm – a Blackberry device with a touchscreen. And somehow, that excitement translated into my standing in line to get one on the day it came out.

I got my Treo 650 four years ago when I decided I needed an e-mail-capable phone. At the time, I wasn’t too impressed with the Blackberry devices – they had just recently started coming with color screens, and they seemed light years behind some of the other phones on the market in terms of features. The Palm Treo, on the other hand, was easy to customize and to modify, and it could function as an all-in-one media player to boot. I could even turn it into a cellular modem for my laptop with little fuss. That seemed like a good enough reason to me to make it my smartphone of choice.

But the Treo and I developed something of a love/hate relationship as the years went by, mostly due to an inconvenient glitch in the design of the headphone jack, which broke very easily and forced me to always use a headset in order to use the phone. I also hated the Treo’s web browser and its default email clients. I was getting annoyed with the stylus pen, too, since it was constantly slipping out of the phone and nearly getting lost for good.

So, I was ready for a change. There were lots of new smartphones on the market, but there was an obstacle in the way…. Read more »