Just bought the Blackberry Storm, and its all over the place.  One second you’re loving it, the other your hands are cramped.  Despite all the standard complaints, the phone has its moments of brilliance, and its not the copying and pasting.   The storms power is that it has almost all of the functionality (minus the keyboard) of a Curve AND it adds huge screen.

I’ve always heard that bigger is better, and with monitors that seems to be the case, so don’t you think that it applies to smartphones too?

The true Blackberry fans seem to be recoiling from the Storm back towards their curves and bolds because of the keyboard.  Fred Wilson has even posted about his plans to stick with the curve and its new upgrade here.  I’ll even agree that if you’re composing a huge amount of text on the phone, you might want to wait, but… its going to be really tough for me to go back to a small screen.

How much of a smart phone can it really be with only 12 lines of text on it? Any new phone with a keyboard on the front isn’t a step forward, its just stalling.  Bigger screens drastically increase the potential for the use of the phone as a platform (along with these 2 criteria), not just as a productivity workhorse.  The iphone proved that despite lacking on the productivity side.  Blackberry absolutely could not avoid this big-screen form factor, and I think they’re on the right track.  They may even take it a step further by adding a keyboard to the big-screen form factor (maybe they should have tried this first?)

Yeah the OS is very rough/slow (even after the upgrade), the keyboard-button is pretty iffy (i’m getting a bit more used to it), and the battery life tanked after about 3pm on my first day with a full charge (the iphone 3G only made it to about 11am).  Once you’re past all those issues, it comes down to keyboard vs. big screen.  But open up Viigo (a blackberry RSS reader), side-swipe through your beloved blackberry email, or chat on a massive google talk screen and you’ll see that for Blackberry,  bigger is better too.