I haven’t spent more than 5 minutes with the new BlackBerry Storm, so this is by no means a critical review, but my initial impression of the touch screen was similar to that made in this quote from Macworld’s BlackBerry Storm Review.
Once you get used to pressing a bit harder than you would on other touchscreen devices, it becomes quite satisfying, but we did have to train ourselves to apply that extra pressure.
Initially the Storm’s touchscreen was so weird to get used to that I thought it wasn’t responding. And in reality, the touchscreen was NOT responding, because it requires a physical depression of the screen. But here’s what was really odd…
Like the iPhone, the Storm gives you visual feedback when you touch the screen, but because it doesn’t type any text until you physically depress the screen the visual feedback is confusing. In other words, when you touch a key on the keypad it lights up like you’ve just pressed it and yet, you’ve really done nothing more than touch it. I don’t know that the Storm should provide any visual feedback until you’ve pressed on the screen.
No lie, I spent about two minutes trying to figure out why the frack I wasn’t getting any text to appear, until I remembered reading somewhere that you really had to press on the display, instead of “floating” your fingers over the keyboard like you do with the iPhone.
This “feature” may play fine with non iPhone users, but like the reviewer says, you may need to train yourself to get used to the idea of actually pressing on the display. And personally, after having used the iPhone, I don’t know how “satisfied” I’d feel after the training was over, now that I’m used to having my fingers fly across the iPhone’s screen.