KEY POINTS:
The summer holidays present an ideal opportunity to test a new smartphone.
Carrying around a mobile device offering access to email and the internet has its advantages during that time of year when you tend to be away from your PC.
While one school of thought has it that the Christmas hols should be free of work email, my philosophy is it's better to head away armed with a device that allows you to process the interminable things on the fly, rather than arriving back at the office to an unmanageably overflowing inbox.
But maybe that reasoning is simply an attempt to justify my addiction to mobile email, a condition I developed last year after being introduced to serious BlackBerry use for the first time.
Symptoms of BlackBerry addiction are well documented and include a heightened state of anxiety upon realising that an entire 15 minutes have elapsed since your phone last alerted you to the arrival of a new email.
This is followed by a fevered search of the room to ensure the device is still within earshot, a gormless and thorough examination to confirm it's still switched on and, finally, a leap to the paranoid conclusion that there must have been a major outage across the internet that has shut down global internet traffic.
Like any addiction, BlackBerry-ism leaves you wanting more. While I had been delighted by the ability to switch on my device each morning to read the latest crop of e-newsletters dispatched to my inbox overnight, last year's BlackBerry only displayed emails in text form, rather than presenting the latest geek news in the graphically richer HTML format.
It was this HTML display capability, rather than the iPhone-copying touch-screen functionality, that first impressed me about the new BlackBerry Storm, running over the Vodafone network, that I trialled over Christmas.
Early reviews of the Storm tended to malign its attempts to imitate the touch interface concept originally owned in a cult-like fashion by the Apple stable.
Having used both devices, my conclusion is that while the experiences are different, there's little between them in terms of ease-of-use in touch navigation and typing, but the iPhone comes out slightly ahead.
As far as an overall comparison of the two devices in terms of their effectiveness as email-delivering business tools, however, the Storm is my preference. BlackBerry manufacturer Research In Motion has taken its well-honed smartphone concept and adapted it into a sleek touch-screen format.
A notable omission from the Storm's feature list is wi-fi capability.
This means that if you want to use the phone to surf the web from the couch or down at the cafe you're compelled to connect using the potentially expensive cellular data network, rather than, say, your existing home wireless network.
This may or may not be an issue, depending on your mobile habits. Smartphone surfing remains more a chore than a pleasure on any device, given the small size of a smartphone screen.
A related issue - and one which afflicts all large-screen smartphones like the Storm - is the short battery life. Heavy phone users may find themselves needing to recharge the device nightly, so will have to ensure they never stray too far from their charger. Nothing brings down a BlackBerry addict's mood faster than a handset with a flat battery.
Review
BlackBerry Storm smartphone
Price: $999
Summary: A well-crafted touch-screen version of the addictive BlackBerry, but keep the charger handy
Rating: **** (out of five)
