Phone
Phone App has recieved a significant facelift, but remains very functional, even with the touchscreen. Three tabs along the top necessitate a bit more navigation than other BlackBerrys when starting your call, but it’s well laid-out enough that you almost don’t mind. One big downer is that the touchscreen remains active when you’re making a call, so there’s significant risk of hang-ups or other mishaps if you’re pressing your face too much against the device.
Handling ringtones has improved dramatically over OS 4.6, even if it’s be sheer word choice. The densely-named “Profiles” menu is now “Sounds”, and there’s now a button at the bottom of the ringtone assignment screen to try out your selection. Before, ringtones would play as you scrolled over them, which was quite jarring if you moused over each one long enough.
GPS
The GPS application saw a great upgrade for the Storm – zooming in and out was simple, even moreso than using the scrollball on other BlackBerrys. The big screen shows so much area that I wished I had a Telus account just so I could download the maps faster over 3G. BlackBerry Maps tends to be very forgiving on data, but I still had the itch for Google Maps for Mobile, a solid notch above the default offering. Sadly, Google has yet to make the jump to the Storm, and neither have many of my favourite apps. Sure, this is something that would be fixed in good time, and hey, maybe the form factor will open up some new possibilities that we wouldn’t see on the more traditional BlackBerry form, but until the software developers catch up, early adopters are up the creek without a paddle.
Internet
The larger screen makes browsing a bit nicer, but there’s still a lot of zooming in to navigate and hit the especially tiny links. This a problem plagued by the iPhone as well, but unfortunately the Storm’s agility in zooming in and out of a page is crimped by less intuitive gestures. You have to use the back key or virtual shortcuts on the bottom in order to zoom in and out, which is pretty cumbersome. This trend of not using gesture-based shortcuts extends throughout a lot of the user interface.
Sure, you can swipe left and right to get through e-mails, and hold down the menu key to switch apps, but shortcuts are the bread and butter of your average BlackBerry veteran, and having that whole QWERTY keypad missing makes moving around way slower than they might be used to. Just take a look at the G1’s unlocking mechanism – they have a 9-point gesture recognition system which could easily be extended to programmable or static shortcuts to make life a little easier, especially for those tasks you’ll be doing dozens of times a day.
Wi-Fi is a conspicuously absent feature on this handset, but I wasn’t really looking for it. I know it’s sacreligious to even suggest that Wi-Fi is optional, but RIM kept it out so that the Bold would remain their top dog and be their sole all-in-one device. The usual thinking in smartphones is to jam-pack every device with as many features as humanly possible, but BlackBerry tries to segregate their features amply so carriers will have something unique to offer and can target users more specifically.
Verdict – 
I realize that I may be coloured as a BlackBerry fanboy for giving this device a verdict of anything more than two stars, but despite all of the aforementioned bugs and UI problems, and as someone who has predominately used BlackBerrys in the past, this is a fine upgrade regardless of which path you’re graduating from – be it Curve, Pearl, or even the Bold if world-roaming is more important to you than Wi-Fi.
It’s refreshing to see RIM break their usual QWERTY keypad mould and go out on a limb for a change. Although not everyone will be as forgiving as I am, I like the idea of the Storm, and considering the clip at which we’re seeing firmware updates, it won’t take long before everything is settled into place. Besides – since when has version 1.0 of anything gone without a hitch?
Overall, the OS still has lots of bugs, and my initial impressions from the BlackBerry Developer Conference haven’t fundamentally changed – the Storm needs work. Outbound e-mails remain saved until manual deletion, hogging up space, the wallpaper doesn’t rotate when changing orientation in locked mode (not to mention that continually hitting and reactivating the screen while it’s locked must use up battery life), listening to MP3s through the browser when it’s in landscape mode doesn’t orient the player properly, you can’t use convenience keys when either the Manage Connections or Sounds windows are up and there are plenty of other niggling problems.
That isn’t to say that the Storm’s hopeless, nor that they haven’t made big strides since the devcon, or even that the smartphone isn’t ready for primetime. Despite a mile-high laundry list of fixes to be made, I have a feeling that in a few months time when prices drop and the software gets properly ironed out, we’ll see the Storm gaining momentum; it’s just a shame that all that hype was met with such widespread disappointment.