the storm
Disclaimer: I do not own an iPhone, although I do own an iPod Touch.
I had to buy a new phone in July because I had lost my old one (a Motorola SLVR.) I could’ve decided to wait a week for the roll-out of the iPhone 3G. I even thought about waiting for the Blackberry Storm to come out, until I realized that it wouldn’t be for several months. But not having a cel phone is kind of difficult when you don’t have a land line, so I ended up with a Palm Centro, which is, eh, OK, but sometimes I do wish I had waited for the iPhone 3G.
But my friend B and my cousin J have been pretty happy with their Blackberries, and I almost ended up with a Pearl instead. I actually forget why I didn’t get one. I hope it was a good reason.
Nonetheless, knowing the buzz surrounding RIM’s products, I’m kind of shocked that the newly released Storm is getting panned. Oh, sure, it’s obvious that they bit off the iPhone with regards to the touch screen. Ironically, that was actually one of the things that made me hesitate about getting an iPhone. Even now, I’m not very good with the virtual keyboard on my iPod Touch, and I keep wishing I had physical keys to touch so I wouldn’t have to be looking at the screen all the time. But knowing how popular their other phones are, I’m still kind of surprised.
Of course, this could all be early-adopter remorse. I’ve heard the iPhone 3Gs were notorious for having all sorts of irksome bugs, and maybe RIM has since released updated firmware since. But the keyboard interface actually sounds kind of atrocious. One of the things that I liked about moving from a numeric keypad to a QWERTY keyboard is that you didn’t have to deal with the idiosyncrasies of predictive text. The Sure Type keyboard sounds like a step backward. And if you actually have to pound your touch screen in order for a key press to register, that would suck.
Back in May, John Gruber predicted that RIM was screwed. It’s perhaps a little premature to say that he’s right, but clearly the winds are starting to shift, if only for the fact that the on-going financial crisis is going to be one hell of a wind storm. Apparently it’s a pain-in-the-ass to develop for RIM. How can they compete for developers against Apple’s and Google’s readily available SDKs? If the Storm really does tank, if Apple soon comes out with a more featureful iPhone, or if Google starts making more deals and getting more Android phones cranked out, the landscape is sure to change.
