By Joe Procopio

I know what you’re thinking – why am I writing a review/column/hit piece on the Blackberry Storm, a handset that’s been out for a while, wasn’t quite bell and whistly enough to make a significant cultural impact, and even with the soothingly ironic voice of Jim Halpert behind it, hasn’t seen the saturation one would qualify as the fourth coming of the iPhone.

I mean, this is no Palm Pre. But then again, the Palm Pre isn’t the Palm Pre either, no?

The reason I’m taking this foray is that I’m not a gadget nerd, I’m a culture nerd, and sometimes tech culture takes a day off, or at least hits the snooze bar. In fact, more often than not, cultural shift does not happen on the scale of an iPod or a Netflix or a Facebook, and when it does, more often than not, the shift fails dramatically, with the end result scaling anywhere from embarrassing fad (the Pets.com hand puppet) to total industry meltdown (Pets.com).

Most of the time, tech culture slowly seeps in, wafting from the dark, damp corners where the geeks play their Dungeons and Dragons (and they still do this, by the way, even with all the fancy technology and worldwide communication gadgetry, there’s still dudes in basements rolling dice and eating way too many pizza rolls) and into the musty, ribbon-candy-scented corner of the dining room where Grandma has her regifted netbook perpetually open to Hotmail.

In the middle, there’s the other 99% of us, and quite a few of us can be spotted holding the Storm.

Coincidence?

Probably!

It’s the kind of thing you don’t notice is so prevalent until you have one. Like kids. Since receiving my Storm, I’ve seen it at the pizza shop, I’ve seen it at the local techie hangout, and I’ve seen it at the pool. For one thing, this tells you it’s a pretty distinctive handset, and to RIM’s credit, I mistook the Storm for the iPhone twice. Also to RIM’s credit, none of the spotted subjects seemed to be working, a trait tied and married to the Blackberry. Seems the device has finally made the jump into other uses, like social networking and making phone calls.

Come on, how often do you see someone making a phone call on a Blackberry? Nine times out of ten they’re holding it six inches from their face and staring at it, thumb moving like they’re desperately trying to defuse a time bomb by pressing the abort button over and over again.

However, the most eye-opening Stormspotting was actually one of my colleagues who had one sitting on her desk. I noted hers and told her I just got one, and without a moment’s hesitation she asked:

“So have you made the transition from the hate stage to love stage yet?”

What a great question, I thought. I’m going to use that as the first line of my column. But then I got all wordy and went too far for a pizza roll joke. Anyway.

In fact, I had not staged with my Storm at all. This is for a couple reasons. One, as a techie, I love everything until the moment I open the box, when its unwavering failure to live up to the hype makes me hate it and immediately fall in love with whatever is next. Two, the Storm happened to land in my hands during a vacation at the beach, the standard kind of beach with no Internet and why-bother mobile reception, so my first few days with the Storm were spent poking around the interface, learning how to use the virtual keyboard, and giving it a huge pass on functionality until I returned to the grid.

Plus, since I forgot to go to the bookstore and the beach house was filled with standard beach fare (Crichton, Cornwell, King, etc. – I’d rather stab myself in the head), I cracked the manual.

You heard me.

Like all things tech, the steeper the learning curve, the better the payoff. Being forced to learn how to use the Storm before trying to shove my entire life into it meant that by the time I actually synced it up and opened my first web-enabled application (Facebook), I was already halfway pro.

This is the major selling point of Blackberry and why it’s the office standard and not Apple or Winmo. You can open an iPhone box and within seconds morph into a hippie… I mean seasoned Apple iPhone user, which means you can play music and surf the web. At the other end of the spectrum, you can spend a month with a Winmo phone and painfully assimilate as long as you stay in the Windows Universe, although I dare you to spend a day with a Winmo phone and not throw it against a wall. I call this a Very Hard Boot.

With the Blackberry devices, you invest a little time learning the tricks, and the payoff is pretty big. While it took me a couple days to make Googlephone my day-to-day, learning as I went, the Storm, after the self-imposed boot camp, took about 10 minutes to adopt.

But the big question remains – is it cool?

Ehhhhhhhh…

The main focus of the Storm, its very reason for being, is to compete with the iPhone. It looks like an iPhone, the UX is iPhonish, it has a decent App Store, and it has a built-in-cult to siphon from. The Storm succeeds in the sense that it’s the goodtime, party, let-your-hair-down version of the Blackberry. But that’s still like being the coolest accountant at the conference. Unlike the iPhone, no one has yet to approach me and ask if they can take a look at it. Plus it doesn’t explode. Unlike Googlephone, when people find out it’s the Storm, they’re not “Ooh!”, they’re more “Oh.”

I definitely like it more than your standard Blackberry, because the touch screen is very cool, and even if the touch feedback wasn’t what they were shooting for and not world-changing, it does what it’s supposed to do. Typing flat-out sucked those first few days, but after that, it became almost natural. Not as natural as a physical keyboard, but then the iPhone’s keyboard is no winner either.

I also like Blackberry’s messaging better than either Winmo or Google. It’s right there, it’s timely and accurate. I’m never thinking what I have to do to sync, retain, delete, or reply to emails, texts, and so on.

Visual voicemail flat out rocks, but we knew this.

Making phone calls, again, not the feather in RIM’s cap, is a pain. It’s hard to select who I am calling, and I found Winmo, Google, and Apple all better at it.

The information and social applications are crucial. You can probably mark today (give or take an hour) as the beginning of the cultural shift away from mobile browsing and into mobile apps for information. I find myself constantly on the app versions of Facebook, the Street, AP, Forbes, and ScoreMobile. I can get my information overload in two to three minutes, not the ten or fifteen it would take me to browse and filter.

So here’s a tip for you web-based startups. Start building your iPhone/Blackberry/Google/Winmo application now. I’ve got a guy you can use. Call me.

How’s the battery? I recently had a day where I tried to buy a house, start a company, land a client, finalize a hiring, find three offsite meetings, wait an hour for a doctor, and trade in and out of four different stocks before earnings, all within 12 hours. This is what happens when I go to the beach for a week. In other words, this is probably the most punishing day I could put it through and the Storm held up, barely, but it definitely rated close to its listed 330 minutes of talk/surf.

Begrudgingly, I’m going to admit that, yes, this is as close as we can get to the iPhone for us business types. Apple is making huge strides on the business front, but Blackberry has made sure that the war is nice, and it will encourage the envelope push on both sides. Apple will continue to dork out their phone for the office, RIM will get better at media and interface, and the Storm, despite the initial bad rap, is a pretty decisive step in that direction.

Speaking of initial bad rap, don’t be surprised if the Pre turns out have been underrated as well. You heard it here… I don’t know… eighth?

So while I am not at love with the Storm, I am at pretty serious like. Like like, if you will. If the Storm picks up its game a bit through apps that take full advantage of the touch screen, it may be a keeper. If not, well, they’ve already released the Tour, the Blackberry for the traveler. And I’m already in love with it.

–
Joe Procopio is the founder of Intrepid Media, a technical and management consulting firm (intrepidmedia.net) and a publishing company/creative network (intrepidmedia.com). He is currently writing Gleaning the Cube, a collection of humorous techie columns that includes exclusive new material. If you’re keeping score, the punishing day went fail, win, win, win, fail, win, fail. He can be reached at joe@intrepidmedia.net.

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