With the touch screen being the newest addition to this BlackBerry, we were anxious to look at it first. To differentiate itself from other touch screens and to hopefully add a feature that users would like, this BlackBerry has a feature called SurePress. When you press a key or icon on the Storm’s screen you feel an actual sensation. There is a subtle click as if you were actually pressing a key giving you a reassuring confirmation that your input has been received. Also, once you press the key, it is surrounded by a blue light, adding a visual confirmation of the key press. While the light is attractive, we didn’t feel that it did much to helping us find the right key.
The SurePress is a unique feature takes a little getting used to, but it is easy to use. While some might find it a welcome addition, after several weeks’ use, we found it a little tiresome. It was somewhat like typing on an old typewriter, just a little more work than we wanted to go through for every screen tap.
Unfortunately, we didn’t find the auto-correction feature of the Storm to be as good as it needs to be. We had plenty of aggravating typos that made data entry more difficult than on the iPhone.
Like the iPhone, the Storm has an accelerometer so that when you turn it to a horizontal position, the screen adjusts to that position. When in the vertical, portrait mode, the keypad has multiple letters per key like a cell phone (shown in Figure 4). When in the horizontal or landscape mode the keypad has individual letters (shown in Figure 5). For those used to the BlackBerry keypad, the Storm’s touch screen will take a little practice and patience.
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Figure 4: Keypad in portrait mode.
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Figure 5: Keypad in landscape mode.
The BlackBerry touch screen keyboard is not as intuitive as the iPhone’s. For instance, on the iPhone when you are typing in a web address, the keyboard changes to show a convenient “.com” key. While the Storm lack this type of keyboard morphing to the task, it can be controlled by learning some of the keyboard shortcuts like inserting an @ sign or a period into the email address field by pressing the space button. Also on some menus, the choices are too close together for touch choosing.
