BlackBerry Strom 2 Review

Introduction

The BlackBerry Storm 2 is the same size and has a design similar to its predecessor, the Storm. But as with most things, the difference is on the inside. The Storm 2 has more storage space, quicker response to touching the screen, and technology that helps make typing and selecting accurate.

Design

The differences between the Storm and the Storm 2 aren't so much in their design. The Storm 2 is the exact same size as the Storm, but five grams heavier. Both are dominated by their screens, have a black exterior, and no physical QWERTY keypad (a downside for the large-thumbed among us).

The Storm 2 has a bar of call send, menu, back and call end keys below the screen. A power button and a mute key are located on the top of the phone and a speaker is located on the bottom of the phone.

Volume and camera keys are on the right side of the phone and a voice dialing key and a micro USB/charger port are on the left side. The back of the phone has a durable battery cover and a camera lens and flash.

The Storm 2 has a sleek design and a large screen. It's not for the touch-screen shy and those that prefer a physical keypad, and it's not worth a trade-in from a regular Storm if the person just wants a smaller phone, because the design hasn't changed much.

Out of the box, the RIM BlackBerry Storm 2 comes with a lithium ion battery, BlackBerry 3.5mm stereo headset, USB cable, pre-installed SIM card, preinstalled 16GB microSD memory card, micro-USB international charger with adaptor clips, quick reference guide, global support kit, tips foldout, documentation kit, and VZAccess Manager CD-ROM.

Camera

The Storm 2 comes with a 3.2-megapixel camera, which is on the higher end of the phone camera quality spectrum. Once considered the top of the heap, 3.2-megapixel and now even 5.0-megapixel cameras have become more prominent on smartphones.The Storm 2 takes relatively true-to-life stills, but the images are a bit blurry and don't show the smaller details. The flash comes in handy, but images are still a bit dark and grainy in poor lighting conditions.

The touch screen is at its least responsive when taking pictures. It takes a few seconds of pressing to get the phone to take a picture, although the lag time for getting the image to pop on the screen after it is taken is short.

Zoom, auto-focus, flash, image stabilization, white balance, and geo-tagging are all options when taking pictures, plus there are black and white, sepia and whiteboard color effects available.Picture quality can be superfine, fine or normal, and photo size options include 2,048 x 1,536 px, 1,024 x 768 px, or 640 x 480 px.

After a picture is taken, a person can rotate and zoom in or out of the image, but not crop it or do much to make the picture brighter or sharper, which is too bad considering many pictures would benefit from those editing options.

The camcorder can be used with or without a flash, and has color effect options. Videos can be recorded in 480 x 352 px resolution or 176 x 144 px for multimedia messaging. Recorded videos have about the same quality as still pictures taken on the phone, and for once the camcorder actually seems to pick up images more sharply than the camera.

To the camcorder's credit, panning quickly or bouncing the phone around doesn't tend to blur the video image. The camcorder picks up a distinct fuzziness, though, and the audio isn't the best. Editing options are nil, but there is a list of playback options to customize how videos are viewed.

The camcorder has better image quality than the grainy camera, but the camera has more editing and image adjustment options. Still, both could use more editing options, including a way to make stills brighter and more precise.

Screen

With no physical keypad and few keys lining the screen, the Storm 2 is pretty much all screen. The 3.25-inch display is reflective when turned off. The color range is on the low end -- 65K-colors -- but the resolution is high at 360 x 480 px. The lack of colors shows in the menu screens, which are often bland and simplistic, a feature common to BlackBerry models. But the resolution comes in handy when watching videos on the phone, which load quickly and come in crisp and clear.The screen smudges easily, but is durable. It is extremely responsive and much quicker than the Storm, taking users from menu to menu with ease and making hardly a mistake even for people with the fattest fingers.

While other phones require pushing keys to turn a screen on, the Storm 2 doesn't have that hassle. A person can turn the screen on by touching the screen. The one downside to this, of course, is the potential for accidental pocket dialing.

A light tap on the screen won't do. A person has to press hard on the screen to open an application, and it takes a few taps sometimes to make the handset do what you want.

The menus make it easy to find what users want, but with so many options, it would be nice to have a more creative or at least colorful menu option rather than having 16 square icons on the main menu screen.

The Storm 2 has room to jazz up its icons and menu screens, and has the potential for mistakes with the ability to turn the screen on with a tap to the screen, even after it has been resting for a while. There aren't many colors, but the resolution is great, and watching videos on the screen is a positive experience. The screen's size is a plus, and moving through options is a speedy task, although it will take more than a soft tap to make anything happen.