Compare Storm 9530 Deals

RIM’s BlackBerry Storm 9530 was the first Blackberry with a touchscreen (3.25-inch) and designed as a real alternative to the iPhone. With a resolution of 480 x 320 pixels, the screen is spring loaded so that whole display acts as one big button, in effect. In landscape mode, a QWERTY keyboard appears, including an on-screen mouse pointer.

At 112.5 x 62.2 x 14 mm it is the usual Blackberry width and be prepared for some weigth: 155 g of precision device. A 3.2 megapixel still and video camera has autofocus, flash and in-built Facebook and Visual Voicemail (it displays on the screen who left you a voicemail and how long it is) applications. The media player includes Vodafone’s Music Store for 30-second previews of tracks and (paid-for) album downloads.  

Fast internet is available via 3.5G/HSDPA and it is a quad-band phone, for potential global roaming. There is no WLAN but Bluetooth offers short-range wireless data transfer and support for a wireless headset. SMS, MMS, email and instant messaging are all supported, plus sat-nav with A-GPS with Blackberry Maps.

Utilities include a document editor (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, .pdf), voice dial/memo and a decent music player (supporting all the popular formats) and video player.

The Storm has 1Gbyte on-board memory and a microSD card slot for up to 16 GB additional storage (an 8GB card is bundled with it). Battery life is rated up to 5.3 hours’ talk time or 360 hours on standby from a full charge.