It's just in beta at this point, but devs and techies far and wide are now invited to take a stab at coding up some magic for RIM's new touch-based user interface elements, orientation control, accelerometers, and virtual keyboards that are getting proudly shown off for the first time in the
Storm. There's stuff in here for regular folk without a single programming bone in their bodies, too -- namely, a full-fledged emulator that appears to have all the features and functionality you'd expect the real thing to have. It's a gas to play with -- even more fun than that
semi-functional G1 demo T-Mobile has up and running -- and it's a good way to test-drive the goods without laying out the cash first. Not to say you could even if you wanted to, since the phone's not dropping for another month at a yet-to-be-determined sticker price.
[Via
Phone Scoop]
Update: Be sure to select Simulators v4.7.0 to get the goods -- otherwise you're going to go through some ridiculously long download, only to discover that there's no Storm to be found. Wouldn't that just suck?
posted Oct 8th 2008 2:56PM
Nice bold with a painted on (probably with MSpaint from the looks of things) touch screen.
Yeah, they obviously threw the skin together in a hurry. If you look closely at the bottom (in the actual simulator) you can see some pretty jagged lines...
what a great find, Ive been playing with it all morning. I can't get its browser to work unfortunately. I would love to be able to test it out before running to Verizon.
Need some help here. I downloaded the v4.7 simulator package... now what? There are a bunch of files in there. How do I get the actual simulator?
Kevin run the applicaiton called "****Launcher.exe"
ANOTHER incompatible Blackberry. No wonder the application availability for BB devices is so abysmal - are any 2 models compatible with one another? Does any of the development tools allow concurrent development for more than one model?
The iPhone may be one platform, but that platform was such a leap forward that adoption is high, and development tools are in place.
Maybe the Storm (or Bold, or Javelin, or some other mutually incompatible model) will become a dominant device, and the other BBs will fade into oblivion. Or maybe dev tools will mature to the point where all the programming effort will be available to a larger base of more than one model.
In order to get the browser working, you need to have the Blackberry Email and MDS simulator package installed (available on Blackberry website). Once installed, run MDS and then the Storm simulator and it will work.
I downloaded the Storm emulator to see how the browser compares with mobile Safari. NOT impressed.
The Storm is supposedly based on WebKit, but that doesn't mean it's automatically good.
A real usability problem I had was that SmartText mode (where the "keyboard" has two letters per key) was terrible at predicting URLs because they aren't proper nouns. Also missing: you know the little ".com" button that appears on an iPhone when it knows you're entering text in the URL bar? Never knew how much I needed it until it was gone. I also really miss the iPhone's "add to homepage/bookmark" button, integrated Google search, and tabbed browsing.
BlackBerry HTML/CSS rendering is better than it used to be, but the iPhone still renders them much better. I'm not sure if Storm is handling javascript properly, though I'm still experimenting.
So far Storm's browsing looks better than previous BlackBerries, but it still has a long way to go.