AT&T

It Ain’t No BlackBerry and it Sure Ain’t No iPhone

This weekend my wife needed a new cell phone.  I’m on AT&T and using an iPhone. She’s on Verizon and will not consider changing. Since she likes my phone , but wants to stay on Verizon, the obvious answer is a BlackBerry Storm .

I was kind of excited because it would be cool to compare and contrast the iPhone and Storm.

Off to the Verizon store…

They actually had 3 working Storms to demo (nice!). She picked on up and started uncomfortably fiddling for a few minutes. All the while I’m hanging over her shoulder trying to help her find/do things. She was having such a terrible time of it and not mincing words. I just figured that it was all her.

Is it all Blackberries or just this one?

Since she wanted a Smartphone I recommended I suggested a traditional BlackBerry with a keyboard. We both tried a BlackBerry Curve 8330 . What a difference! It was smooth, stable, and easy to figure out. It just worked. This is what the old Palm Operating System should have become.

While she spends 20+ minutes with the sales representative I decided to give the Storm a shot (and see if it was just my wife’s fault).

What a craptacular user experience. Nothing is easy to find or do. Nothing behaves intuitively or smoothly. Menus jump around and wiggle away from your fingers. It’s super slow and clunky too.

I thought that the one I was using might be defective so I tried another one. Nope, still garbage. The BlackBerry Storm has the worst interface and most frustrating user experience I have seen on any consumer electronics device not manufactured by Sony.

The other BlackBerries have really nice interfaces that are so easy to use. RIM obviously knows how to make a good interface, so what happened here? Did they outsource the design to an out of worm American car designer? This thing is pure doo-doo. I would rank it far behind ant Windows Mobile, Nokia Symbian, and LG phones that my wife and I have had. Don’t even bring up my iPhone or the BlackBerry Bold.

Before you say “typical iPhone fanboy”, I would can tell you 20 things that suck about my iPhone. The problem is that I found about a hundred of them in 20 minutes on the BlackBerry storm.

What do you think?

Are there any BlackBerry Storm users who can point out what I’m missing? Maybe I missed something. Please let me know in the comments.