Articles tagged with: rim

RIM has never had a problem selling BlackBerries to people more interested in the serious business of mobile messaging than messing around with multimedia, but times are changing. It’s no secret that the consumer-friendly iPhone is also starting to catch the eye of business users, which is perhaps why Apple’s share of the ever-expanding smartphone market recently surpassed RIM’s for the first time.

Not that RIM is taking this licking lying down, of course, and the BlackBerry Storm is its attempt to beat Apple at its own game. And it really means business. Not only is the Storm unashamedly influenced by the iPhone’s design, it even does away with the one thing that made the BlackBerry famous in the first place – the keyboard.

We got hands dirty with the BlackBerry Storm just before the weekend, and you’ll find our first-impressions video right here. However, we haven’t yet had the time (okay, unbelievable courage) to mimic the actions of the chaps over at phoneWreck – namely to completely gut their review Storm to see how it all fits together.

Okay, so dissections of gadgets are nothing new but the Storm has served up a novel take on touch-screen technology, in the form of its clickable display. Which begs the question: how did RIM turn an entire handset screen into a button? Well, phoneWreck’s teardown provides the answer. More after the cut.

Typical – you wait months for one long-anticipated smartphone, and then two turn up at once. We’ve just seen the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and now here’s the RIM BlackBerry Storm.

After all the speculation about what form RIM’s answer to the iPhone might take, it’s good to actually see the Storm in the flesh – or at least plastic and brushed aluminium. The good news is that despite dropping the keyboard in favour of a huge capacitive touch-screen, the Storm works as well as any other BlackBerry smartphone – as our hands-on video shows.

Many would give their right arm for a BlackBerry Storm but not many would give their right leg. "T.J." from Toledo, Ohio, has though - or more accurately his lower right calf, which is now given over to a life-size tattoo of the touchscreen RIM phone.

He went the extra mile to get a tatoo of the Storm, the CrackBerry logo plus an "iPhone Sucks" motto to win CrackBerry's "What Would You Do For a BlackBerry Storm" competition. His prize? A BlackBerry Storm, of course.

In a "memo" sent by a PR "leaked" to the Register, Vodafone has engaged in some serious point scoring against its rival, Orange, over its early and (as it turned out) not so successful release of the BlackBerry Bold. Due to what the memo calls "software issues and technical faults", which forced Orange to temporarily pull the Bold, the Newbury-based network feels it now has the perfect opportunity to point out the "superiority of Vodafone’s network coverage and testing processes."

Rubbing just a little salt into Orange's wounds it says, "We are pleased to inform our partners that these issues do not affect any BlackBerry Bold devices offered by Vodafone [thanks to] considerable time working with RIM to optimise the BlackBerry Bold software for Vodafone's network."

For anyone who's followed Apple's fortunes over the years, the transformation of the company has been remarkable. And that's not just a statement about its finances – it long ago shook off the "beleaguered" tag of the late 90's – but also describes the core of the company's business.

Ten years ago, it made computers. Now it's the iPod company, and with the incredible results it posted this week, it's probably fairer to call it "the iPhone company". In a year, phones have gone from almost nothing to providing 39% of its revenues. No one else has managed to make this transformation from computer company to consumer electronics business so successfully. But not quite so successful as some web sites would have you believe...

When we compared web browser speed on the Apple iPhone and RIM BlackBerry Bold back in August, little did we realise that our test had one or two problems that rendered it invalid. We’ve been trying to arrange a repeat test ever since then, with no success. Until now.

The reason we ran the test in the first place (we seldom bother comparing smartphone web browser speeds) was because the BlackBerry Bold seemed very slow at rendering web pages over both 3G and Wi-Fi – even compared to the iPhone over EDGE. While our initial test was flawed (thanks to a flaky Wi-Fi connection), other Bold owners repeated it and many also found it to be slow.

Still, we weren’t able to rest until we could repeat the test ourselves and so that’s what we’ve (finally) done – after the cut.

Some cast iron confirmation at last that the BlackBerry Storm will be here on Vodafone from the first week of next month. The information's come direct from the horse's mouth via T3 who've been chatting with RIM over in the States.

And while RIM wasn't giving any concrete details of tariffs, it did say they would be "competitive" with the iPhone so expect a price tag anywhere from free to the 16GB iPhone 3G's £159 maximum, with tariffs from around £30 and possibly some unlimited data thrown in.

So just three weeks left to wait if you can hood off on putting your name down on a G1 or splurging on an iPhone.

[T3]

Just days after T-mobile made a G1 emulator available to the online world, BlackBerry manufacturer RIM has posted a Storm simulator on its website.

However, it’s far from the consumer-friendly affair put together by T-Mobile. Indeed, to even find the thing, you’d have to hunt hard on developers’ area of the BlackBerry website; not to mention jumping through a few registration hoops that begin to make you wonder why you’re bothering.

To save you the search effort, click this link and be sure to select the v.4.7.0 download from the drop-down list. Not that you’re quite done yet, mind – more after the cut.

We already know quite a bit about it but now it’s official – the BlackBerry Storm (or Thunder?) will be available, er, sometime in autumn. So that’s any time between now and December 21st, then.

At least the press release issued today by RIM (the full text of which is pasted after the cut) does confirm a few of the specs that we already knew.

The Storm will have a 3.2-megapixel camera, 1GB of memory (and support for 16GB microSD cards), stereo Bluetooth, quad-band connectivity and so on. Anyway, click after the fold for the full low-down.