BlackBerry Storm's clickable screen (and the rest of it) dissected, exposed
By Tim Stevens 
posted Nov 22nd 2008 4:30PM
posted Nov 22nd 2008 4:30PM
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I am really enjoying my Storm. It really does need software updates to improve the speed of the device as it lags badly sometimes. But I think most of the major problems can be easily fixed with software. Hopefully this includes the camera (which sucks).
I really like using this phone for open Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and PDF's that I get in email. It works so well. It is also really obvious the potential this phone has because Documents to Go is so fluid when going through large PDF's and Powerpoints. RIM just needs to fix its software.
your right... this phone's prossesor is clocked 100 MHz faster than the iphone so how is the prossesor to blame for lagging speeds?
Hear that, Engadget?
meh
That's what your mum said when she looked down and saw what she had given birth to.
no samboini your thinking "where is the shotgun"
Hey Sambonini and Kai Kai,
how's life in the Circus business?
OMG ITS LARRY THE CUCUMER!!! :D
do people hate Christianity that much?
Really the processor is to blame for the phone's sluggishness?
I haven't heard that. Pray tell when this became public fact.
In other words there is nothing RIM can do (OS revisions) to make the phone faster since there is something wrong with the processor itself. Correct?
No, the processor is not to blame. It's the fact that the phone is running pre-release software, due to a glitch discovered at the last minute in what was supposed to be the shipping software. You know, like Engadget reported a few hours ago. Sometimes I really can't stand to read the tripe that gets passed off as journalism here...
I don't know if that's an indisputable fact or not. There seems to be a lot of confusion out there over what CPU this phone is actually using. The datasheets say PXA930 which is definitely on par with the S5L8900 the iPhone uses but this teardown shows a MSM7600 which is almost hard to believe.
I think you meant like BGR reported YESTERDAY
Technically, CDMA phones like the Storm exclusively use Qualcomm chipsets. So unless it being a world phone lets it use a different processor, then its probably not using the PXA930. The Bold uses that though.
... And seriously. Check the damned website. You can SEE Qualcomm MSM7600 -__-. Although a little fuzzy.
NO DISASSEMBLE! JOHNNY 5 IS ALIVE!
For the clueless... who is Johnny 5?
It's from the movie Short Circuit.
You, sir, get a + from me.
Brilliant! I lol'd
INPUTTTT! MORE INPUTTT!!!!!!!!
I wonder... if you were to use the same button on your keyboard for every single letter, how long before it wore out? Because that's sort of how this thing works, right?
Guess we'll find out in a few months.
Yeah it will definitely be interesting to see how that plays out.
If you think mouse click, you'll have a moment.
If you take apart your mouse and compare the construction of the switches vs this, you'll have a moment...
No way. I click my mouse often, but nowhere NEAR as many times as I hit a key on my keyboard. This reply alone is... well I don't feel like counting, but it's a whole shitload of "clicks" of the keys.
Haha I like Paul saying -oh I love my little blackberry, it works so well! If only the processor didn't suck and they didn't try to copy apple, I still love it! -ALL BLACKBERRYS SUCK- the iPhone 3G is the way to go all the way and paul the iPhone opens word, powerpoint, excel, and PDFs, oh yeah and it came out a year ago! there will never be a phone from a company like apple that works so fluidly and doesn't have the crap verizon slowing it down!!!!
I never said the processor was slow... The software is a rolled back version because of a last minute security flaw. Remember the iphone's security flaw where you could bi-pass the password... Yeah RIM actually cares about these things because people use BB's for real work.
You know what is funny. For 2 days now I have been using this phone. Not only has it not crashed once in the those 2 days but it is faster than iPhone's browser and Verizon's network is faster than ATT's. How long can you go without a browser crash on iPhone? 3-4 websites?
Who are you? iEye's less retarded cousin?
Finally we get some storm coverage from engadget! I can't think of another site ignoring this device this badly.
They should have used the Marvell processors instead of the Qualcomm processors. The Bold sports the Marvell processor and folks love how fast it is.
The processor in the Storm is faster than the processor in the iPhone. The lagginess is not due to the processor, it's due to the pre-release software running on it.
what they should use is BlendTec (food) processor.. For a brand new, highly anticipated gadget to come out with sour reviews like this, I bet it WILL blend!!!
Dimple? Button? Bah. Just cut off the top of a mason jar cap, stuff it behind the screen and you'll have the meatiest click ever.
(okay, you need a dimple for that one too)
wow ... so much is surfacing now .... now I'm uncertain if I should wait for a "next gen" Storm ... with a faster and better processor . wow.
OMG ITS LARRY THE CUCUMBER!!!:D
uhhh I cant reply to iEye
Extensive review? Processor the reason for sluggish interface? Really, Engadget, you can do better than that.
The clickable screen is a composite of XY coordinates and a simple button. This should be fairly robust (I doubt it will break after a few thousand pushes). It sounds a bit like the new MacBook trackpad/button. This works really well and its ironic how the two companies have used the same solution for different applications.
But no Storm for me (yet). It looks great but the lack of WiFi, relatively slow interface and lack of Mac syncing OOTB make it a version 1 product. If it had the speed and capabilities of the Bold.... Knowing RIM, Storm2 will be out in around 6 months regardless of the success of Storm1. I'll wait.
The MacBook's touchpad button is actually hinged along the top. I wonder if the Storm's is hinged at all - hingeless would be good.
I would really like to know what every "It does this well, but lacks this... so I'll wait" person has for a phone. I would imagine there is not a perfect phone out there at the moment, so I can imagine that your put this response for every possible phone out there. Do you not own a phone? Just curious.
Damn you, Blackberry
I should not have bought iPhone
Maybe it will break
Don't worry, Apple has thoughtfully infused the iPhone with a healthy dose of planned obsolescence. It'll be off your hands in no time!
Sluggish - you guys don't know what that means until you have waited for the text messaging, or the clock function on my iPhone to appear - it can be 3 seconds!!! And that is on the 6th version of the software.
crapberry sux
That was almost clever dude, maybe next time.
I love how it looks like a little nipple!
This is one of those times you wish you worked in the product design dept. for a company like blackberry when you have an idea like this. Guess someone else had the same idea.
Yea... WiFi... That was the biggest disappointment in my opinion, regardless of the OS issue. The software issues can be fixed, but WiFi? No... RIM made a bad decision on that. Hopefully the next Storm would have it. But for this new great phone (not including the OS issues), I give props to RIM.
Engadget seems to have it out for this device.
The commentary and its prejudicial edge obliterates the credibility of the blog.
I'm getting pretty tired of it. Going down hill fast.
Engadget has every right to put down this device. They shipped it half assed with buggy hardware and every is praying on the fact they will fix it later. Im sorry but im not in the business to buy now and hope they fix it later. I wont it to work exactly as advertised out of the box. So engadget should review it exactly how they received it, and right now its not as amazing as it was supposed to be. Hardware or software issue or not Rim dropped the ball on this one and it seems the crackberry fanboys are even dumber than the apple ones
so iphone was perfect right out of the box? oh ok thanks for clearing that up for us all!
im wondering if the gsm version will include wifi, anyone know?
I hope that if this is indeed pre-release software, that we get an update soon! For one, the accelerometer on the phone really takes a while before it switches from landscape to portrait and vice versa most of the time. I have had my phone crash 2-3 times already within just 24 hours :( good thing is the times it happened, I wasn't doing anything with the phone. It was sitting on the counter and I saw the screen go white.
Damn the hard resets take a long time to reboot. After all that said, I still love the phone. Looking forward to updates!!
correct me if im wrong but it looks like the camera is on the top left inder the screen.
wtf is it doing there and it looks like a really big screw hole for a mobile phone if it is that
So let me get this right. every key press from every text and every email all is handled by the same single button.
That dimple will need to deform and pop back for each press.
So in general use it will get 20-30 times the use of a regular Blackberry button.
That means it will need to be 20-30 times more reliable.
I think this may be a design flaw.
It's not just a CPU. The qualcomm chipset contains 2 CPUs. A 400MHz ARM11 and a 240MHz ARM9. It has a DSP and video and audio codecs in hardware to implement MPEG4 decoding and ENCODING! It has a good 3D graphics processor (4 million polygons per second) and an imageprocessor (for the codecs.....audio too).
All in all, pretty much all the functionality of the beast is in this chipset. Of course a lot depends on how they implement it. If they only use part of the chipset, they may not have the second CPU. It's also designed for java accelleration. The speed depends a lot on whether Blackberry uses the device with the software provided or trys to shoehorn their other blackberry apps and OS into the device. The latter would result in a much poorer performance.
For those interested, the datasheet for the MSM7600 is here:
http://www.datasheetpro.com/268121_download_MSM7600_datasheet.html
As for those comments about the single button. I'm sure it was designed with this in mind (that it is going to be used 100 times more than a keypad). However, I agree, it could be a single point of failure that would be annoying.
-me
I just discovered that this is the SAME chip as the IPHONE!!!!!!
-me