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When Apple iPhone emerged on the mass market, everyone was on tenterhooks on just how this sleek new toy from Apple was going to beat the rest of the competition with its features, and of course, with its signature Apple software and firmware. Even before the release, people were going wild about the fact that Safari was bundled with this particular Smartphone.

iPhone supremacy

There’s no doubt about it- with features that make other phones look amateurish, iPhone is now the new industry leader, beating back the rest of the large companies with its unbeatable 3G capabilities. Nokia, Symbian and the other players in the Smartphone arena are all trying to get a slice of the fast expanding market.

But it seems that a literal Storm is fast coming on the horizon. Verizon’s own ball in the game is promising to deliver not just one more feature, but many, many improvements to what iPhone can already deliver.
Let’s put the Storm to the test

One of Blackberry’s Storm’s most noticeable feature is the touch screen technology that Verizon integrated into the new phone, to contrast heavily with the ultra responsive screen of the iPhone.

The main difference is that you have to actually press on the screen to make an input. So let’s try to apply this to an ordinary situation with the Storm. Say you’re a professional and you want to create a document with Microsoft Word. You start typing, but you notice that you have to type the same way that you type with a laptop to get anything done.

This feature can be disorienting for former iPhone users, while some simply loved the technology, because you actually have to do something aside from touching the screen.

For professionals, the keyboard is absolutely vital in getting anything done. One of the problems of the predecessors of the iPhone and the Storm is that the QWERTY orientation of the keyboard was almost shoddily done, and you commit the same mistakes with keyboard over and over again. Because let’s face it: our fingers are not one centimeter across.

Images, videos and the Web

Just how efficient is the Storm in handling three of the usual activities of a multimedia phone user? For those who don’t know yet, Verizon’s Storm has higher resolution than Apple’s iPhone. The margin is close, but relevant enough to be felt: 3.2 megapixels of pure picture grabbing fun.

The Storm is video-capable, hurray! This was one particularly disappointing lack with the Apple iPhone, because everyone was expecting to shoot a few party videos with that 8 or 16 gigabyte storage space. But alas, to no avail. Maybe next time Apple would be kinder and install video capabilities as well.

As for the experiencing in accessing the Web, let it be known that the Storm also has full HTML support and allows you to view the website as they would look in any ordinary PC or notebook.

Unfortunately, Verizon’s new golden boy cannot connect via Wi-Fi. Disappointing and utterly saddening, but nonetheless, we can still play around with the other features while Verizon finally realizes this missing piece and puts it in, in the next installations of the Storm.

The Smartphone phenomenon has just begun, says enthusiastic mobile technology commentators, as the largest multinational companies unfurl their deadly Smartphone arsenal, battling with each other for market supremacy.

Apple’s entry into the Smartphone arena has just made things much more complicated for the “silent” giants, many of whom appear to have been caught off guard. When the glass surface of the Apple iPhone caught the first rays of sunlight, a new cult of Smartphone users simply loved the interface, and of course, the concept of having a phone and a computer at the same time.

Verizon, the company responsible for the Blackberry craze late in the nineties, was quick to respond to the Apple iPhone threat- The Storm was born to combat Apple’s own Smartphone.

Verizon stirs up The Storm

One of the basic features of Blackberry’s The Storm is the stereo Bluetooth; surprisingly, for all the “value added” features of the Apply iPhone, the stereo Bluetooth is missing. What gives, Apple?

Another strangeness about the Apple iPhone is the power source for the Smartphone; how come the battery doesn’t come off as easily as other mobile phones or even laptops? This might be fine if the Apple iPhone’s battery lasts as long as the Energizer bunny, but it doesn’t.

Going to a service center to have it replaced is just too much of a hassle to count as a good thing. Again, what gives, Apple? How come The Storm has an easily removable battery, for easy battery swapping when one battery fizzles out of action?

Space counts

Now, we’re not really into large memory for Smartphones, but nonetheless, the Apple iPhone is limited to 16 gigabytes of storage space. And that is already fixed, presently. The Storm has worked around this difficulty by accepting memory cards up to the same amount of memory, which gives this particular Smartphone an edge.

Do you see it now? If you can use 16 gigabyte memory cards for The Storm, you can buy two or five or ten of these memory cards thereby making your Smartphone infinitely flexible when it comes to storage.

Let’s look at photo and video options for both the phones. The Apple iPhone is limited to 2 megapixels (much like the SE K750i) and cannot be used to take videos. To the horror of many who have been used to shooting with their camera phones, the iPhone has no video recording features at all, compared to The Storm, which can, while sporting a sufficient 3.2 megapixels.

The question of multitasking

For those who are sore for the iPhone’s incapacity to become a mobile modem, AT&T says that it’s coming very, very soon. Though if you want the wireless capability now, Blackberry’s Storm already has the feature.

And finally, devices that run with Microsoft’s very own Windows Mobile are providing quite a wonderful time to users with expanded multitasking capacities. It’s never fun to close other programs when you want them running- which is the biggest challenge to Apple yet. What will you do with an iPhone that has so many applications, but you have to turn off one to get to the other?