Menu, usability
Well, this is where the interesting part starts, as BlackBerry has an operating system, as it always had, but let’s make things clear. The very ingenious name of RIM’s own operating system is BlackBerry OS, and Storm has version 4.7. The most important change since 4.6 is the support for touchscreen displays, but the menu structure didn’t change much besides support for the software keyboard. There is a 624 MHz CPU working under the hood, while the internal memory’s size is 1 GB.
Storm has a 360 x 480 pixels large display. The image displayed is beautiful and the screen’s diameter of over 3” is large enough, and as I have mentioned before there’s no stylus in the package. At first it might not be obvious, but Storm has a multitouch display, which has been used only on the iPhone before, so we have all the ingredients of an outstanding experience, but unfortunately this didn’t really come true.
First it’s important to know that this display doesn’t detect only touches, but pressure as well. This is a very strange feeling, as the display wobbles in its frame, there is light coming out at the edges and we can really press the whole thing about half a millimeter down. So there is a pressure point and from there usability becomes very interesting. If we just lightly touch the display the “cursor” goes where we have pointed and if we press the screen we in fact “press OK”. This takes quite a time to get used to, we for example never had such a handset in our hands (and neither really did others), but after two days of practice I have been navigating the menu with proper confidence.
The multitouch feature, however, doesn’t worth much. One would expect scrolling, zooming, web page resizing like on the iPhone, but this is not true. The system doesn’t support such features, scrolling is smooth, but it’s not progressive, we can’t “spin over” a list like on Apple’s phone, but we can scroll a page and that’s it. Handling the pictures is another strange thing, as I’ve seen that we can zoom in, but we can’t zoom out and there is another serious issue, which is speed.
The menu system has a really nice fade animation to make our days brighter, but as it comes to more complicated multimedia features, the whole handset slows down a lot. We have to wait long seconds for pictures to expose, and image viewing, rotation and zooming speed is terrible. BlackBerry OS is a multitasking system and if we just step back in the menu the applications won’t close, these have to be produced out separately from the options. And it’s worth it as we can increase speed a lot if we don’t leave the camera’s program open for example.
There is no problem with the logics, everything is quite evident. The icon bar of the main screen displays the most important features, the full menu fills in two whole screens. One of the greatest hits of BlackBerry OS is that font size can be increased by pixels (8 being the default), there are tons of fonts available and we can fine-tune the display’s sensitivity. On first use we should take our time setting up these things, as it takes about fifteen minutes and it can save us of lots of headaches.
A cikk még nem ért véget, kérlek, lapozz!
