Back when the university cellphone policies were changed, I took advantage of it to get myself a Blackberry Storm. I was tempted to get an iPhone, but ultimately decided against it because of the hoops you have to jump through to install third-party apps. I got spoiled by my old Palm, which had a huge developer community and tons of great apps you could install without worrying about approval from Big Brother. I've given up on the Palm for other reasons, so the Blackberry platform seemed to be the best remaining choice.
I picked up the Storm because I wanted a nice big screen and I've never been a fan of the tiny physical keyboards and trackballs on the other Blackberry models; the Storm seemed like it would be the easiest conversion from the stylus-based operation of the Palm. The device seemed pretty cool from testing a co-worker's newly arrived one. So I plunked down the money and ordered one...
When I actually got the thing, after the initial excitement, I was kind of disappointed. Sure, it was miles ahead of my old Palm in things like web browsing and file storage, but it was also laggy and required frequent reboots because of memory leaks. The on-screen keyboard was really slow, and the camera almost unusable due to a three-second delay between clicking the button and the actual picture being taken. And for me the biggest deal was the poor text editing capabilities; I was so used to being able to quickly jot stuff down on the Palm, easily update notes when I needed to, edit large text documents, work with a nearly full-size add-on keyboard, and so on. In this respect, the Blackberry Storm was nearly crippled. At least it was better than the iPhone, which at the time didn't even have copy and paste!
Clearly, the Storm had been released before it was really ready.
Thus I joined the thousands of Blackberry fans eagerly waiting for an operating system update that would fix these problems. The company was working on one, and I saw various leaked versions and almost installed several of them, but ultimately decided to wait for the official release. When it came a few months ago, it helped, but not really enough. The phone was more usable, required fewer reboots, cut a second off the camera delay, and had slightly better text editing, but was still annoyingly laggy too much of the time.
By then I had my netbook, and just used that for all my documentation and editing needs when I was on the go. The Storm was pretty much just my phone and calendar, unlike my old Palm. I stopped monitoring the Web for more Storm updates, and resigned myself to the situation. After all, I was lucky to have as much as I did, right?
So then late last week I hooked up my storm and out of the blue was told there was a system update ready. I went ahead and did it without paying much attention; I figured it was just a minor bugfix for some program, like I'd seen before. Much to my surprise, it was a full update to the brand spankin' new Version Five OS. It's a huge improvement! The camera now works almost instantly. The keyboard is much faster. Selecting text is no longer a trial-and-error process. The much-improved predictive text function saves a lot of keystrokes. There's flick-scrolling to move quickly through long documents and lists. The new Files app makes it easy to navigate large document trees and preview your files. I'll still have to practice a lot to get my text entry speed up to what I could do with the Palm stylus, but now the effort actually seems worth it.
So I'm actually happy with this phone now. Imagine that.
