The Blackberry Storm New Touch Screen Phone
Research in Motion, Ltd. (RIM) has announced their development of a new phone with touch-screen control similar to that made popular by Apple's iPhone. It is to be known as the BlackBerry Storm Smartphone. Being the newest model of their Blackberry phones which are more or less email-centric, the Storm gets away from the big text entry keypad to compete in the touch screen phone market. Enter RIM's hot new interface with a nice big screen that in some ways performs better than the iPhone's. Because it can distinguish between a soft and a strong touch, BusinessFox.com and at least one writer at The Associated Press feel that the computer-like functionality makes it superior to that of Apple's market leader. Seemingly reminiscent of the use of a desktop's mouse, moving the cursor about the screen is accomplished by lightly sweeping a finger along the interface. Activation of a link is performed by a stronger touch that actually slightly depresses the screen and then releases with a click making it more like using a keypad or clicking a mouse button. In this way a user can tell that he or she has made a selection.
The screen does take up most of the face of the Storm, but in addition there are navigation keys for the phone, menu, and escape functions. This Blackberry phone supports taps, slides, and multiple-touches for familiar tasks like panning, highlighting, zooming and scrolling. It has an accelerometer built in that makes it so the image on the screen can orient to either portrait or landscape format, depending only on which way you hold the device. In landscape mode the keyboard appears as full QWERTY while the SureType 5-column and 4-row keypad displays in portrait. Another nice automatic feature is the backlighting which adjusts to the ambient light, to optimize visibility and conserve the battery. For travelers the the Storm can connect to wireless networks throughout the world.
When browsing the Internet, the Blackberry Storm uses full HTML and has icons for several web page viewing options, besides the portrait and landscape modes. Streaming video and audio, file downloading and RSS support are also included. The built-in camera has 3.2 mega-pixel resolution, flash, auto focus and even constant lighting for video recording. The Storm has one gigabyte of memory of its own, expandable to 16 GB through its microSD/SDHD card slot. For media capabilities the 480x360 pixel screen will play movies in full screen mode, and of course display pictures, slide shows and your audio library. Add GPS for photo geotagging and location-based services, plus stereo headphone support as well as Bluetooth. All in all the Blackberry Storm sounds pretty awesome.
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