I’ve had my Storm for a little more than a month now. I’ve decided it’s time for that follow-up review.

First of all, I’ve had to have the phone replaced once already. The buttons on the phone stopped working. Of the 4 buttons below the screen (the hangup, call, menu, and back buttons), two of them stopped working on me. After a quick call to Verizon’s support, they happily replaced the phone. I still like the phone, but I’m a little wary about it’s durability. I’ve had the replacement phone for about 3 weeks now. It was about a month before the first one had its problems, we’ll see how this one fares.

Ironically, while i was waiting for my new phone to come in the mail, the old phone slipped out of my hand, and bumped my desk (about a 2″ fall) and the buttons started working! I still didnt trust the old phone, and sent it back to verizon as they asked when i got the new phone in the mail.

Overall, i like the phone. The screen seems like it could use some work though. If you try to press at any of the edges, it’s difficult to get a response. I did find something of a hack online to fix this. You simply take a small piece of paper, and fold it up a few times so that its just a little thicker than a sheet of paper (in my case, 2 folds seemed to do the trick, making it 4x the thickness of just one sheet). Take that folded piece of paper, remove the back of the phone, pull out the battery, and place the piece of paper between the back of the battery, and the inside panel of the phone. Then put the battery back in, and put the cover back on. This for whatever reason, helps the issue. I do not know what long-term effects this may have on the phone, but it doesnt seem like it’s putting pressure on anything vital, at least, not enough to cause a problem.

Themes for the phone are sometimes finicky. One of the things i really wanted for this phone was an LCARS like theme. It’s a touch phone after all. I tried a handfull of them, and found one that i really liked, and used it for a while, but i eventually switched back to the standard theme. Why? because themes don’t just change the look, some of them actually change some of the interface. Every one that I tried degraded the user interface, some of them slowed the phone down, some even caused lock-ups! I decided the look just wasn’t worth it.

Application support is nice on this phone. It’s not like an iPhone. I cant find app’s that will control every aspect of my life, but that’s ok, i dont need that. I have found a number of cool apps. all of which thus far have been free. Including a weather app, apps for twitter, mysapce, and facebook, and even a shoutcast streaming app called flycast.

One of my concerns was calendaring and syncing with Zimbra. I’m sad to report that i have NOT found a slick way to handle this. The blackberry will not talk directly to Zimbra, well, i lie, e-mail itself is great. I was able to use BIS to setup a standard imap connection Zimbra, but the calendar and contacts are not there. There’s a connector to go from a BES to Zimbra, but we don’t have a BES. I played around, forever, with an open source BES like server, called Funambol, but i’ve had no luck with it. Thus far, the best compromise i’ve found is syncing with outlook. Which is a bummer, because I don’t use outlook regularly. So i need to boot windows, fire up outlook, sync, and then shut outlook back down. Sort of a waste for all that outlook is designed to do, you know?

I do still find myself in somewhat envy of the iPhone crowd, but theyre just not an option for me at the moment. I do not want to switch providers, and verizon does not currently offer an iPhone. I wouldn’t be surprised to find myself switching to an iPhone if Verizon ever offer’s one.

-War