Verizon BlackBerry Storm Ship Date Moved Up A Week

I ordered mine last Thursday evening before release. Arrived today at 10:59 although its sitting at home waiting for me.

What are the reports from people who have gotten theirs. Give us the run down. Hows the build quality? The Click Screen after using it for a while? Same with the OS?

I played with one at circuit city. The OS felt Choppy. Does this hold true, or was that just do to and over used demo that hadn’t been turned off in days?

@ TB

So far, so good. I haven’t had any issues, crashes, etc. Heavy usage. OS is a bit slow, but that can be cured via a OTA update (interestingly, no longer than the time it took me to roll the ball onto the icon and then tap, which in some cases I selected the wrong icon when going too fast). The build (hardware wise) in my opinion is solid…you can tell by the weight too. Seems many of the stores have models that are not up to snuff regarding which OS version is on, missing applications like the browser (when I was at a VZW store), etc. I’m still playing with mine, doing a comprehensive breakdown and comparison between the Storm, the iPhone 3G (it’s direct competitor in the consumer market), and the Pearl (my previous phone from everyday usage…a good benchmark to determine if I’ve noticed an immediate increase in productivity, something we all like to see when thinking about ROI).

I have played with it several time at my Verizon store. It was a little choppy as people have mentioned but overall I think I was happy with it. If I remember correct the os it was running when I looked in the system was .61 not .65 like they shipped out with. Regardless what from what I have read and seen on youtube it seems like an OTA update would I’d necessary and the sooner the better.

Via my trusty 8330

Well, here’s two issues that I’ve found so far from personal use…

1. When using Visual Voice Mail, I can barely hear the message with the volume all the way up. Then when I go to speed dial, the sound is way down and I can’t tell if it’s actually dialing or not (only after VVM). I’ve also heard the same is true when listening to music based on other posts I’ve seen. Right now the Visual Voice Mail is useless to me, except I can see who called.
2. Memory leaks. If you thought previous devices had issues, wait until you see this one. I’m testing out all 4 major IM’s running in the background…Yahoo Messenger, Windows Messenger, AOL IM, and Google Talk. I went from 37 to 5 in 24 hours. Pulled the battery, and got back to 37. Everything set up the same again, and in two hours I’m down to 20, and in four hours down to 17. This was one of my big concerns going into the purchase of this device. RIM should have put a decent amount of Flash Memory in there to eliminate this concern if they don’t have a fix. An option to store contacts and mail on the storage card or even on board memory would be nice, but I realize it’s not part of the security they offer. Still, the option would be nice.

PS – Using VZW Navigator. I like it. Worth the $10 p/m and is the most accurate navigator I’ve used on a phone so far (I’ve used AT&T’s and Sprints…AT&T sometimes drops the feed, and Sprint twice veered me off in all sorts of directions away from my destination…good thing I knew where I was going). VZW Navigator looks very nice in landscape mode, and I was listening to directions clearly via my bluetooth headset while blasting a little Metallica in the car. Was nice to actually see a navigation screen tilted in landscape mode in my Charger near the stick rather than squint at my Pearl from afar…no hiccups, system crashes, etc. Very accurate and gives you ample time before you need to make a turn, etc. I travel a bit, so it’s a nice portable feature. Also, the VZW Access Manager worked out well. More to come…

Looking forward to reading your feedback. Let me know if you see the same issues I listed above…I’d be curious. You can email me directly instead of posting on the site.

I’ve actually been doing a full review and breaking everything down by importance/points system for client recommendations on the small to mid size level. Comparing it to the iPhone is certainly interesting. And I’ll also say this…the Pearl, in my opinion, is the most…for the lack of a better word…’powerful’ little phone I’ve ever personally used. I’ve grown an appreciation for how much a small little device can do.

I played with two different display model Storms at the Verizon store a couple of days ago and experienced two different sets of issues.

Starting with the positive: the web browser is quite good. I thought the screen click was actually kind of cool. Unique for sure. I like the “feedback” from pressing it.

I agree with others who say that pressing a particular part of the screen for a function can easily bring you the one next to it. You will either get use to that and learn where to press… or you won’t. That is odd. That is just a mapping issue on the screen and I wonder why RIM didn’t clear that up prior to launch.

I thought rotating the screen worked fast enough. Users complaining about the lag seems odd. It doesn’t rotate in an instant, but it seems to rotate fast enough for me. Maybe not as fast as my second generation iPod Touch, but it isn’t unreasonably slow.

Some issues I had that I am sure I could clear up on the manual:
the clock kept popping up on the screen and then I would have to press a button to get back to the main screen. That got annoying pretty quickly and I wish I knew how to disable it. On the other unit I tried I could not get the keyboard to display. I looked at the options and there was one for hide keyboard, but the keyboard was already hidden.

My Blackberry Storm shipped on Wednesday, but I had it shipped to my work (thinking it would be shipped on a day that I was there). I probably won’t pick it up until I go in on Monday. I will try it out for a couple of days (with a manual) and see how I feel about it.

The clock stays on whiles its plugged into a charger. So far I haven’t had too many complaints. I’m really enjoying the phone.

How can they build a tool like this and not offer wifi? Maybe Blackberry made it with wifi and Verizon said “no way.” The Verizon model of hammering the customer for every last cent of revenue sure gets old.

The independence that Apple had to build their iphone and then sell marketing rights to ATT is better because they made the tool to be as useful as possible and then made it a phone.

How can they make it without WiFi? It is Verizon… it is to be expected that it would not have WiFi.

I will grant that, in my area, Verizon coverage is awesome. It is not better than the WiFi in my house though. If I like this phone, I will sure miss the WiFi I get with my TMO Curve.

One wonders how many Storms Verizon could have sold this past weekend had they been in stock…

They will still sell a lot, and some will order or wait to buy the phone anyway, but missed opportunities are still missed…

I ordered a Storm for myself at 6am on the release date. The payment came out 12/09 and I probably will not get it until the 15th. It is hard to ask you Blackberry fan’s to be patient as I am on pins and needles as well, waiting to recieve mine. The ship date is 2-3 days from the date that the payment was processed, not ordered. That’s where the confusion lies. If it makes you feel any better, we employees are put on the back burner for orders so that you guys get yours first! When the original Voyager came out we weren’t even able to begin ordering them until about 4mos after the release date!