A second place trophy.

Let me please preface this by stating that I am in no way endorsing Blackberry,  or the Storm, my undying and completely justified love affair with Apple products keeps me from considering any other device, especially in competition with the IPhone 3G, anywhere near equal, so don't take this is a sign of any level of interest on my part. 

In some very recent developments a new 'apple killer' came on the market, the BlackBerry Storm. I am not going to get into serious technical details here, because they aren't worth mentioning, for instance the blackberry's modest 1GB storage capacity (as compared to the 8GB & 16GB iPhone models), and its location on the sprint network (yuck), but i do intend to talk about my all time favourite characteristic of anything; design! I also should make mention that I am not going to even consider discussing that TMobile phone that recently came out, nor will I mention its name, mainly because I cant figure out what its name is. I will say this for the aforementioned 'iPhone Killer', I think its one of the least attractive things I've seen in years. its screen graphics remind me of some Palm Pilot I had in 1998, it looks like it's made out of Easter egg plastic, and I really feel bad for parents purchasing it for their children in lieu of an iPhone this Christmas; their crying children will be justified brats. That's enough of that.

The Blackberry Storm is reasonably sexy, and although its not an iPhone little brother (more like that poser kid down the street that kind of dressed like the cool kids but could never talk the talk), it certainly would make some lesser discerning, and very blackberry faithful Sprint contract holders reconsider hefty cancellation fees to switch to at&t, and certainly feel a bit better about their choices. Blackberry finally dropped the horrid qwerty button design, for however small or slim or neat looking blackberry made them, they were still there. There looks to be only 4 buttons on the front, which is a serious improvement over all those keys from the past, allowing them to make the screens larger and the experience more interactive, and of course make it a bit easier for those with giant thumbs to operate.  I really like that, because unlike the approach of the Tmobile phone, I think people really do enjoy typing and navigating on screens. Although i should say, Apple still wins with its one button design. I don't see why Blackberry insisted on putting four buttons when they could have put the unnecessary three (excluding the on/off hang up) buttons into the interface like Apple did, or even considered having no buttons at all. I hear that the phone 'clicks' when buttons are pressed, gimmick. From the picture, the Icons look decent, a little bland in comparison with the iPhone, but not awful. I feel as if the materials make the phone look a little cheap, and fragile, as opposed to the godly glass front and smooth aluminum backing that all looks like one piece. I am a big proponent of complicated design made to look like its all one piece, as referenced in my last post on Barack Obama's design team. The storm looks from the front to have 9-10 pieces, its not completely seamless, although its made obvious improvements over the 'key for every function imaginable' design from previous phones. One thing I most definitely should mention about the promotion for this device is that its quite a bit deceiving of Blackberry to run commercials where the phone is sitting upside down, and someone goes to pick it up and you get just a glance, really making some serious hype, and buzz, and then for Blackberry to release anything less than a serious iPhone competitor, in fact they really released what looks to be a very inferior product. Tisk tisk. My assessment, to compare the Storm to the iPhone would be best served by making reference to the comparison of the Zune to the iPod (of any model), and I'd definitely say that the Blackberry storm will have much more relevance than the Zune in comparison to their Apple counterparts, but definitely a very distant second place trophy.