Blackberry Storm 9500 v/s Apple iPhone 3G
This is a detailed comparision of the Blackberry Storm 9500 v/s Apple iPhone 3G . The iPhone 3G has been a best seller and the Blackberry Storm 9500 is touted to be its toughest competitor yet. I will try to list all their features and compare them.
Let’s have a look at their features:
- Dimensions: 112.5 x 62.2 x 14 mm
- Weight: 155 gms
- Display: Touchscreen, 65K colors, 360 x 480 pixels, 3.25 inches
- Memory: 1 GB internal memory + upto 8 GB MicroSD
- Connectivity: GPRS, EDGE, 3G
- OS: Blackberry OS
- Camera: 3.15 MP, 2048×1536 pixels
- GPS: GPS with A-GPS, Blackberry Maps
- Applications: Blackberry Application Centre
Apple iPhone 3G
- Dimensions: 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 mm
- Weight: 133 gms
- Display: Touchscreen, 16M colors, 320 x 480 pixels, 3.5 inches
- Memory: 8 / 16 GB shared memory
- Connectivity: GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth v2.0
- OS: OS X software v2.2
- Camera: 2 MP, 1600×1200 pixels
- GPS: GPS with A-GPS, Google Maps
- Applications: Apple iPhone Appstore
Detailed Comparision:
Design, Dimensions and Weight:Both the Blackberry Storm and the iPhone have similar dimensions as you can see in the table above. While the Storm is wider, the iPhone is a bit longer. The iPhone 3G weighs about 133 gms while the Storm is bulkier at 155 gms. However 20 gms isn’t much of an increase, anyone can live with that.
The iPhone has won kudos around the world for its excellent design and build quality, but the Blackberry Storm is no cheapskate either. One look at the phone and you know that the designers at RIM must have invested a lot of time on it. The design is very similar to the iPhone with a large touchscreen display dominating the body, but with four keys below the display – Call, Menu, Back and End as compared to the iPhone’s super minimalistic one – Home key. The Storm mostly made of brushed aluminium and plastic, has superb build quality and looks very durable.
Display and Interface:
The Blackberry Storm sports a 3.25 inch, 65K color TFT touchscreen display with a wide resolution 360 x 480 pixels, compared to the bigger 3.5 inch, 16M color touchscreen display with a standard resolution of 320 x 480 pixels on the iPhone. The iPhone has a tried and tested, excellent display which is ideal for movie watching. The Storm’s display is bright with nice contrast and almost matches up with the iPhone. It is wider and has nice pixel density due to the wider resolution.
The interface was the main highlight of the iPhone – its fabulous touchscreen with the revolutionary Multi Touch interface. The Blackberry Storm isn’t very bad at it either, it comes with a ‘clickable’ touchscreen using a new tech called SurePress. It allows you to actually click stuff using the touchscreen and provides feedback, it tries to emulate a mouse and does well at that.
OS:
The iPhone is powered by OS X v2.2 while the Storm is powered by the Blackberry OS v4.7. The newer 4.7 version offers a lot of improvements over the older versions and the interface is a lot similar to the iPhone’s. The interface is not as refined as the iPhone’s – it doesn’t feel suited for touchscreen control. The iPhone’s interface is much easier to navigate through. The virtual QWERTY keyboard on the Storm is nice but the click feedback doesn’t help much when typing. The predictive capabilities aren’t as good as the iPhone’s too and it takes relatively more time to type using the Storm’s keyboard, but atleast you can copy paste text using the Storm. Most of the problems should be sorted with an update. The interface of the Storm is also a bit sluggish compared to the iPhone though more functional.
The Storm sports a nice new browser which has improved greatly over previous iterations and now loads pages faster, but the iPhone’s Safari is still ahead. Email is the best, as expected of all RIM products. Corporate email is RIM’s forte and the Storm doesn’t let us down on that part.
Camera and Multimedia:
The Storm sports a 3.2 MP camera which is much better than iPhone’s 2 MP. Heh, It can also record video. It also has a nice Music Player interface and nice sound quality but the iPhone obviously wins in this aspect. The video playback is also pretty nice and supports more formats natively than the iPhone but the display quality while nice, is not as good as the iPhone.
Talking of storage, the iPhone 3G comes in 8 / 16 GB versions while the The Storm has a meagre 1 GB internal memory and supports upto 8 GB external memory through MicroSD.
Software:
The iPhone has a huge collection of excellent software, thanks to the Appstore. The Storm also supports and comes with an application manager but 3rd party software for the Storm is rare to find yet. RIM has announced a Appstore like Application Centre for the Storm soon and applications and games for the Storm should be flowing in. You can view and edit your Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents on the Storm whereas you can just view them as email attachments on the iPhone. You can also send files using Bluetooth on the Storm.
Both the iPhone and the Storm comes with EDGE and 3G and GPS with A-GPS functionality but the Storm surprisingly misses out on Wi-Fi. Both of them have superb call reception and nice battery life.
Finally…
The Storm is an excellent smartphone with nice features but doesn’t actually outperform the iPhone in most aspects. It has its list of shortcomings but does offer a promising alternative to the iPhone and the G1. It will definitely appeal to RIM’s large user base who want an upgrade, but I doubt it will be able to entice any iPhone users.
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