Taken by the Storm

So my brother loaned me his Blackberry Storm a couple weeks ago. I used it mostly for texting. I was immediately impressed by the hardware design when I first played with it.

Good input method remains elusive among handheld devices. Don't even start with the iPhone's on screen keyboard - without a stylus, it is simply annoying. I can't comment on Blackberry style hardware keyboard cause I haven't used that kind that much, but I've used a slide out one on an htc phone, which was pretty alright - the down side is, it makes the device incredibly bulkier.

Back to the Storm, the clever part about it is, it is both an onscreen (software) and hardware keyboard. It senses contact and highlight the key that it thinks you want to press, but doesn't take any action until you press on it, which is when the screen clicks - the screen itself is one giant hardware button. This allows you to be really sure where your finger had landed before committing to a key stroke.



I spent a week acquainting with it, but eventually gave up and went back to using the Hermes. The reason: the Blackberry software has trouble sensing which thumb is doing the pressing, which is important in thumb texting where both fingers go to work at the same time.

I believe the Storm has a piece revolutionary hardware, but the software needs work.