Blackberry Storm 2 9520 touchscreen smartphone
RIM gets finger friendly again?
Surprisingly though, for such a message-centric device, the onscreen Qwerty keyboard feels a little cramped, even in landscape mode, on the 3.25in screen, which seems a bit bizarre – perhaps there's just a sliver too much space between the letters. The letters light up in blue as your thumbs glide over them, which looks lovely, but it's not always obvious which letter you're highlighting before you press it, and it's therefore not as intuitive as, say, Apple’s iPhone system, where the letters are flagged up large as you press them.
The virtual keyboard will still divide the BlackBerry faithful
We were slightly disappointed also to find that the numeric keypad reverts to Qwerty after pressing a single number, which seemed a bit counter-intuitive, though the on-screen word prediction and multi-touch ability meant that typing could be exceptionally fast. The new 'flying cursor' function which comes with the Blackberry 5.0 OS proved useful too, producing virtual bookends at the beginning and end of a piece of text you want to highlight.
Another big jump with the Storm2 is the addition of Wi-Fi, unaccountably left out of the original's spec. So you now have broadband Internet to add to the handset's HSDPA 3G network connection. The browser layout includes zoom in and out icons on screen, along with 'column mode' and a 'cursor mode' for easier access to links and for cutting and pasting.
The on-board accelerometer is nicely sensitive, flipping the screen into landscape mode a second or so after you turn it on its side and you can double tap for quick zoom. Good as it is though, the browser isn't the quickest to load with more complex pages, and Flash video seems to throw it out too, often preventing pages from rendering properly.
The 3.2Mp camera features autofocus, image stabilisation options an LED flash and a basic 2x digital zoom operated by brushing the screen up or down. Picture quality isn't bad though, with reasonable colour balance and sharpness in good light. It launches quickly in a shade under two seconds and there are quick options for sending your pics using email, Facebook or Twitter. Video capture quality isn't as good, at 480 x 352 pixels, but it's easily up to YouTube standards, and you can set the flash as a video light.
The camera is fairly basic, but the shots are acceptable in good conditions
Watching video on the Storm2 is however, a joy. Films look good on the sharp, bright 3.25in screen with its 360 x 480-pixel resolution and 65,000 colours. However, there's no option to stretch the resolution to fit the screen size. It can play MPEG4, H.263, H.264 and WMV files, but no AVI or DivX, which puts it firmly in the midrange for video versatility.
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