Fire Storm

The Blackberry Storm 2 9520 – reviewed but revered?

Blackberry 9520 Storm 2

The Blackberry storm 2 is RIM’s new improved version of the Storm touchscreen range, It has a fully functional touchscreen as well as intuitive text options and no traditional Blackberry QWERTY keyboard.

As always we have reviewed this phones suitability for the business mobile phone market.

The original Blackberry Storm was a bit of a let down as it was so easily over-shadowed by a number of other new smartphones including the i-phone and also the HTC Hero.

How does the new Blackberry Storm 2 compare as a smartphone in the business market?

The Storm 2 sits well in the hand and is just 5g heavier than it’s predecessor, it’s really easy to get your fingers around the touch screen whilst holding the phone and also to hit the on/lock screen button on the top left-hand side.

The Blackberry 9520 has a large number of buttons around the outside that are typically rubberised – which I guess is a matter of taste, but personally I quite liked it. On the left is the USB port and also a function button that allows you to access your favourite function as a shortcut.

On the top is the power/lock button and the mute key. The 3.5mm headphone jack is recessed into the phone on the right just above the volume up/down keys.The button used to take photos is on the top right.

On the front of the phone are the call, menu, return and terminate buttons – these have been embedded into the LCD screen for the Blackberry Storm 2. They’re now part of the SurePress click screen.

The original Storm had a single piezoelectric sensor behind the touchscreen and the new Storm 2 has 4 of these which means the screen is easier and simpler as well as more responsive to use. You can also click two parts of the screen at once, which means you can type out those emails slightly quicker.

When you put the phone into sleep mode the screen locks down meaning that you cannot accidentally press buttons when you do not mean to. Although you can answer and end calls in sleep mode.

One thing that did make the Blackberry storm 2 feel a little cheaper than it’s business smartphone counterparts was that the battery case is not completely flush and wobbles very slightly when using the phone.

The phones comes packaged with a microUSB travel charger (perfect for business trips), USB cable, 3.5mm headphones, a pouch and a nice cloth to wipe the screen with.The headphones double as a hands free kit but are not the best quality – fine for calling but not good enough for music enthusiasts.

The Storm 2 uses the OS 5.0 interface, which is RIM’s latest and greatest. It does feel a bit wierd to apply pressure to a touchscreen so that it clicks but the functionality is good.

The phone takes a few minutes to boot up which is not a big issue as it is not often that you remove the battery.

Ther home screen has a half menu in portrait mode, with your eight favourite applications, and when moved into landscape all the menu icons become available. The options can all be quickly clicked into making the functions really accessible.

The screen is of an excellent quality, the scrolling is quick and easy and very responsive and all of the icons are a nice size and are easily clickable.

Occassionally we found that the OS can slow down slightly, and when this happens all the buttons will lock, meaning you can’t do anything until the system has fixed the issue – which it tended to do quickly.

The main difference between the BlackBerry OS and other systems is that on the Blackberry each screen is kept minimal, and you can get to further options by hitting the menu button, this makes messaging your colleagues or managing your contacts a lot simpler – which is perfect for the business mobile phone user.

Incredibly important for the business mobile phone user is the quality and clarity of the calling, and the BlackBerry Storm 2 is second to none; great for a phone designed around messaging.We had no issues at all with calls over the week that we tested it.

The 3G connectivity was really good but it did switch to GPRS on occasion even when we had two bars of signal – I think that this focus on reliability above speed is really important for business users and a good sign of the Blackberry brand.

The calling interface is simple and clear to use with easy navigation.There is a search option at the top of the screen so that you can get to your contacts but it was just as easy to navigate through. If you’ve got Facebook Connect added to the Storm 2, you will get some Facebook notifications added to your contacts so you can see some of their profile info and you can poke them from the contacts screen.

On your contacts profiles you can add images, web pages or company information too, which is useful for business contacts. a handy little tool was one that allows you to select a contact and find out your exact call history to and from that number.

Messaging on the Blackberry Storm 2 9520 is magnificent and of course the Facebook integration is great but it would be good if other social networking sites were supported too such as Linked in.

Also when you move the phone from portrait to landscape the on-screen settings move with you.

The Storm 2 is has excellent connectivity, to set up email just enter your address and password (and perhaps a few extra details depending on your server).

If you’re using an Exchange platform for messaging for work you’ll have to download a pretty expensive piece of software to do so.

The text input system with BB OS 5.0 allows you to enter text as fast as you like, and if you’re working with commonly used words the intuitive text auto-correct works really well.

The copy and paste functions are also really easy to use within messages (just tap the screen and grab the bars that appear left and right to select). You can also search for messages from a certain contact simply by holding down on their name – the search quickly returns all options.

You can add multiple email accounts to the Storm 2, up to 10 in fact, so you’ll never run out of places to receive all that important electronic mail from.

In the messaging you can view all your received mail at once – be it Facebook, SMS or email. You can start an IM conversation from here too, with Google Talk and Yahoo Messenger included in the box.

The touchscreen and SurePress clicker are the two main components of the browser navigation, and unfortunately neither is particularly noteworthy.

The browser was fine when we were on mobile sites but when we switched to HTML it did start to struggle and often took 10-20 seconds to load pages with media on them.

That said, it’s not too bad over WIFI and was just about up there with the i-phone but not close to the HTC Desire.

When web pages are reformatted for the screen it doesn’t always work out well, often leaving bits of text off the screen even when you’re using the ‘Column View’ smart-fit technology.

Another problem we had was selecting the right link. You can scroll to the link using the touchscreen, with each one under the finger being highlighted, but when it comes to selecting it, you can easily miss when the SurePress screen rolls under the finger when clicking.

You can zoom in by clicking on any part of the screen, but zooming out is not so easy, you need to keep pressing and pressing the reverse zoom key.

Overall, speed is important when browsing and there were too many things slowing down the experience on the Blackberry Storm 2.

The camera is simple but functional, it performs well enough in decent light and it works quickly. Shutter speed could be improved but a nice little feature allows you to stroke the screen up and down to zoom in and out – great idea!

The video is also very simple but it does do a basic job but is not effective enough for business use. Its HVGA (most decent mobile phone cameras carry at least VGA) and we’d estimate it runs at 24fps, as the footage taken is actually fairly smooth.

The Storm 2 is not designed as a media player but the music we listened to on it came out well (once we used some decent headphones) but it is fine for every day use as it comes in the box.

The feature in the contacts where you can hold down a contacts name to see all of the messages associated with them is replicated in the music player – you can hold down on an artist’s name and this activates a search that brings up all other songs by said artist, This is useful if you have a lot of tunes on your BlackBerry Storm 2.

Blackberry-storm-2

The video player is pretty good and it plays a large amount of video formats and sizes them easily to fit the screen nicely. It supports MPEG4, WMV, H.263 and H.264 formats, so you’ll need to convert your AVI files to get them working.

There’s no FM radio, so this is not great for listening to the cricket whilst you are enjoying some drinks in the bar.

The Blackberry Storm 2 9520 comes with a number of apps, For business mobile phone users the main applications are the fake-Office options, which allow you to view and edit Word and Excel documents on the go which i found very useful and is now a core benchmark of ours for business users.

For consumers there are a number of social networking and IM applications included.

The Blackberry App world has all of the apps available in one place, most carry a fee but there are a number of free ones.

The battery is pretty good, it’s a 1400mAh unit but if you use a lot of push email and also use the suretouch buttons on the touch screen a lot it does tend to drain the power fairly quickly.

There are a few other good functions on the phone – when you synch with Google Mail, the phone can also be set to pull down your calendar as well, making it easier to see what’s going on.

Plus, when you enter a contact into your address book there’s an option to add a birthday on there as well, which pops up on the calendar then sends you reminders before the event.

From the home screen you can access the communication manager with a single click, this lets you turn off everything from the mobile network to Bluetooth.

You can also set up a new connection for Wifi and other options.

The Wi-Fi allows you to connect to your home network automatically when in range, and transfers all the data services to this channel.

There is also GPS included and it’s used with the Maps application. The Blackberry maps app wasn’t great but Google maps was available and worked slightly better.

As with other modern Blackberry’s the storm 2 9520 allows you to back up all your files to your computer using the desktop manager to make sure they’re safe if you lose the phone.

Overall this is a great phone for business users as it has all of the functionality and speed.

About the Author

Business Savings Advice is blog that aims to help small and medium sized UK businesses to save money on the services that are vital to their operations. This particular blog is about business mobile phones and includes reviews of new handsets as well as special offers from the 5 main providers as well as some resellers

Business Savings Advice is blog that aims to help small and medium sized UK businesses to save money on the services that are vital to their operations. This particular blog is about business mobile phones and includes reviews of new handsets as well as special offers from the 5 main providers as well as some resellers

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