I’ve noticed that the initial excitement which greeted the arrival of our nice new BlackBerry Storm handsets seems to have been tempered somewhat by a number of usability niggles, so I thought it might be handy to go through some of these and see if we can improve things...
Firstly, and most importantly – be patient! As you know, the Storm employs a completely new user interface and you shouldn’t expect to be able to master it immediately. No interface is completely intuitive (whatever the makers claim), and whilst the Storm is conceptually similar to its predecessors in many ways, many elements of the functionality have been moved or upgraded, not least of which is the fact it’s now touch-screen and you have to use this clicky-keyboard thing! But we’ll come to that shortly – note I’m hoping that by now you’ve managed to address at least the basics of navigating around the device and its menus!
Battery life. A pretty in-your-face one this, given how long our previous handsets lasted between charges. But don’t despair, as part of the problem is that your initial usage is always going to be much higher as you get to grips with the beast and play with all its bells and whistles. And the other main factor is that the default settings are set to maximize its screen clarity at the cost of battery life, which can be dealt with easily. From the home screen, press the menu button then find and click the Options icon. The select Screen/Keyboard. There are three items we’re interested in, the most important of which is Backlight Brightness. This is defaulted to 100%, but I found that 60% was absolutely fine (and I’m currently trying 50%, which is looking good too). You might like to adjust your Backlight Timeout value too, which is how long the screen will stay lit for if you don’t touch anything – I’m using the 20 seconds setting at the moment, but might revert to 30. Finally, make sure that Automatically Dim Backlight is set to On. Oh, and if it’s set, turn off Key Tone. As a result of these, I’m lasting between two and three days before bottling out and doing a recharge.
Main menu stuff. Out of the box, the range of icons on the menu screen doesn’t really match what we’re used to seeing. I found it certainly benefitted from some tidying up, so here’s what I did. Firstly, find the icon called Application Centre. This contains a list of optional applications that you can install – I’d recommend you go at least for Vodaphone Find & Go (satellite navigation – you get 6 months free use before having to pay for it, which gives you a chance to see if you’d use it!) and Google Maps. I also installed Windows Live Messenger, because I’m sad, but not so sad as those who might add the Flickr and Facebook options...!
Now, let’s get things organized so the menu is more usable. It obviously makes sense to have your most-used icons at the top of the menu, and moving them around is easy. Just touch the icon you want to move (so it’s highlighted), and then press the menu key. Select Move (not Move To Folder), and then touch the icon which is currently where you want to put this one. It’ll get highlighted by a surrounding line. If where you want to move it is off the screen, just slide the screen with a finger to move it around and then touch again where you want to put the icon. Then just press the Menu key again and select Complete Move.
Finally, check your Applications icon – this is actually a folder which contains a number of the utilities such as Tasks, Memos etc (and, by default, is where any of the applications you installed above are put). You might want to promote some of these to your main menu – just select the item you want to move, press the Menu key and select Move To Folder. The main Menu page is called Home, so select that one. You can then move it into the appropriate position as above.
OK, let’s talk about typing. Remember – be patient! I think everyone will have their own way of dealing with this, so all I can do is tell you what I do and offer some hopefully useful tips as well. Right – first of all – whenever I have to type anything, I switch to landscape mode. Probably just a personal thing, but I find it easier than using multi-tap keys or battling with the insistent predictive typing prompts of SureType. And I use it in the old BlackBerry way, cradling it in both hands and typing with my thumbs. Note that I believe the keyboard is optimized to a clear left-right split on the letters – if you try hitting say “s” with the right-hand, it seems harder to catch the letter accurately – and so I’ve slightly adjusted my typing style.