BlackBerry enters the sleek-smarphone arena. It remains to be seen if it will succeed.
One thing is for sure: Apple stirred everybody’s attention when the company presented the iPhone last year. Furthermore, Research In Motion (RIM) did the same thing when they rolled up their high-end mobile device, the BlackBerry Storm. Both of them are very innovative in their own way, but let’s see if the Storm managed to steal some of iPhone’s market share.
Well, not really. In fact, the market is so big, that there is room for two devices to appeal many users, without affecting each other. Furthermore, it is interesting that, even though the Storm has superior specs than the iPhone regarding the camera and the business applications, this didn’t convince Apple fans to covert to the RIM religion.
According to a recent study made by ChangeWave Research, the iPhone hasn’t lose much of its market share since the BlackBerry Storm came out, back in November. In fact, iPhone’s share increased from 17% in September to 23% in December. The study also reported that, among respondents who planned to buy a smartphone within three months, 39% would buy a BlackBerry and 30% are intending to purchase the iPhone. While the data suggests that BlackBerry brand is still the leader of the smartphone market in the U.S., Storm has yet to prove that it is a true competitor of the iPhone.
Here are the full specs of the BlackBerry Storm: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHZ, HSDPA, 3.25 inches TFT screen with 480x360 resolution with touch and SureType features, Bluetooth 2.0, built-in GPS with assistance (A-GPS), Java-enabled web browser, 3.2 MP camera with autofocus and a 1400mAh Li-Ion battery with 5 hours and a half of talk time.
It is somewhat striking that each of these two mobile devices lack features that have become industry standards. As an example, the camera on the iPhone does not record videos. Moreover, the iPhone lacks the copy/paste feature, which is essential for many users. On the other hand, the Storm lacks Wi-Fi capabilities; this thing alone explains why many business-oriented users refrained to buy the device.
When RIM launched the BlackBerry Storm, there was hype because of its features, with the clickable touch screen being the most innovative. Well, many users and reviewers were quite disappointed with the device when they found out that the phone had many glitches and didn’t quite meet the expectations.
Users complained that the SureType screen is causing them usability problems when they used the emulated keyboard. Moreover, it seemed that the operating system itself was laggy and even hanged at times. Others blamed RIM for not implementing a hardware keyboard and let users to rely solely on the on-screen keyboard.
