BlackBerry Storm 9500

Welcome to the new kind of BlackBerry - The first touchscreen device from RIM is this Storm 9500 which has most of the features of the earlier variants of BlackBerrys along with a brand new display.

The touch sensitive display is the most arguable feature of this beast and certainly RIM has done an excellent job by coming up with such a wonderful touch screen. The operating mechanism on the touch screen is of two folds. First, select the option you want to execute by selecting it on the touch screen. This highlights the feature. Then you have to "click" on it to execute. This makes the BlackBerry Storm 9500's touchscreen very user friendly as compared to a traditional touch screens. The 3.25-inch screen itself is bright, colorful and high-resolution (480 x 360). Video playback is sharp and smooth, and the extra pixels on the large screen means eye fatigue won't be much of an issue. The lack of a QWERTY keyboard should not be an issue as the touchscreen hosts a keyboard while typing in a landscape mode. The Storm automatically switches between modes when rotated, so if you suddenly find that you need to do some more intensive typing than the SureType arrangement allows then it's a hassle-free transition.

Although the Storm is similar to the user interface of the earlier version of BlackBerry -"Bold", it supports features of touchscreen similar to iPhone like taps, slides and multi-touch which makes it more usable. The Storm 9500 also has a built-in GPS receiver and a navigation function. It comes with a 3.2 MegaPixel camera having autofocus and flash for high resolution pictures.

The Storm 9500 supports both business usage and normal consumer usage as it contains push email, document editors, and also media player for music which makes it a complete smartphone. The sad part is that this 3G device DOES NOT support WiFi.

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. The overall design is smart but unexciting, with just four physical keys on the front underneath the large screen. Internal Memory is 1GB, expandable by up to 16GB using microSD cards.

On a whole, this phone has lot of cool features but on the other hand lacks WiFi which is a big blow. Again, this phone could be very useful for a corporate user as the keyboard and the screen are flawless also adding up a cool camera and good music player.