BlackBerry Storm 9500 review

As with the Bold, battery life is excellent. We made half an hour of phone calls, downloaded 50MB of email attachments and then left the phone in standby mode in an area with a strong HSDPA signal to run flat. The Storm managed a highly impressive 89hrs 21mins, roughly on a par with the Nokia E71, BlackBerry Bold and iPhone, though it lagged behind the superb Touch HD. Again, considering this is with push email enabled, it's a highly impressive result.

And that push email support, as ever, is excellent. Setting it up with multiple email addresses (up to 10) is very simple using the online setup web page, and the messaging display is clear and easy to read. Searching is a breeze, too.

There are some small drawbacks. As with the Bold and HP's Voice Messenger you don't get the ability to create Word and Excel documents, you can only read and edit them. You don't get an awful lot of storage in the box as standard - just a 1GB microSD card to add to the 128MB of built-in flash memory. And the BlackBerry web browser isn't as responsive or as good at accurately rendering web pages as the Windows Mobile-based Opera Mobile 9.5 or the iPhone's Mobile Safari.

But these are not enough to put a major dent our appreciation for the BlackBerry Storm. The only reason it doesn't walk away with a recommended award is that the Bold has a slightly more complete feature set, is easier to use by dint of its excellent keyboard and is better value overall. Other than that the Storm is an excellent handset and one we'd like to get to know more intimately.

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