Saturday, February 14, 2009

Confessions of a Phone Hater, Part II

YouAreYou was long enamored of his iPhone, and now that he's come clean I have no choice but to fess up: I hate my BlackBerry Storm.

Here's why:
1. The Accelerometer . When I want the screen to flip, it doesn't flip. I flip it horizontal, I flip it back to vertical, finally I shake it. I hold it vertical. It doesn't flip. Also, when I don't want the screen to flip, it flips. This happens frequently when I'm holding it vertically and I rest it on a table. Then, it flips. Even when it does flip on command, it lags before it flips.

2. The lock button. I'm talking about the one on the top of the device, which isn't actually a button - it's a location that you press. Because there's a delay before the phone locks (and no accompanying noise or button-click), you're never sure whether it's locked or unlocked. Nothing happens, so you hit the lock location again - then it slyly unlocks and re-locks in succession.

3. GPS. If you use Google Maps on your Storm, you've seen this one before: "Your location within 1100 feet. GPS temporarily unavailable." I estimate that the GPS has worked 10% of my attempts to locate myself.

4. The camera. Almost unusable. The lag between the time you press the button and the time the camera takes a photograph - I counted three Mississippis. That is an embarrassing amount of time. Not to mention the color quality of the photo might as well be grayscale.

I've had several updates, and these problems still exist. I gave it a shot, and I'm not a happy or satisfied customer. But the reality is, at this point I couldn't stand a phone without a touchscreen. Using a little ball to navigate a screen? Intolerable.

When they unlock the iPhone, count me in; maybe YouAreYou will get the Storm.

5 comments:

Rachel Luxemburg said...

As a longtime PalmOS fan I had a huge problem with the idea of using the little trackball to do everything on a phone, but once I finally bit the bullet and got a BB Curve I quickly realized why people call them "Crackberries".

Try the trackball. It works really well.

Anonymous said...

New iPhone is coming in June - there's a rumor it has a video camera on the front and back too. Hold out till then, that's when I'm upgrading! LL

Sansserif said...

Fiat - You're probably right; like everything, it takes getting used to. But I think I'm already too touch-screen spoiled.

Anon - But will it be unlocked? I'm on Verizon...

Unknown said...

g1 homie, get with the program!

full keyboard, touchscreen, trackball, the best of each world.

plus google synch. brilliant.

MLamp said...

I hate it too. Could it be any more difficult to make a phone call? Argh.