I’ve been uber excited about the acquisition of my Blackberry Storm, I have been following all the updates via Crackberry and BGR for months, and finally on Monday my Storm arrived via FedEx.

But before we get into my impressions on the device, let’s address how the intertubes feels on the subject:

Wired Magazine - “The votes are in:The Storm Sucks”
New York Time’s David Pogue, scathingly upleased
MSNBC on RIM’s lack of response to the internet being pissed off

The results are not good, by and large people hate it, and the bugs that you have to deal with are just too much to tolerate. When viewed as an ‘iPhone killer’, there is just no damn way. iPods are stable, game changing devices, but in the beginning they had problems too, it just took a while to hammer out. I didn’t expect RIM to destroy the iPhone out of the gate, but I did expect them to be a little closer.

First impression out of the box:

My Storm came loaded with OS 4.7.0.65. Activating the phone was easy, not like the iPhone debacle if anyone remembers, and I was making calls within seconds. Right away I noticed a large problem, the screen is a bigass button, it *clicks*, when the phone is held between your face and shoulder (as often it is when one needs to write or drive) you end up pushing one of 4 options on the screen during a call: speakerphone, mute, flash, and conference call. With the exception of speakerphone, any of the other options pressed will lead one of the call participants to believe that the call may have been dropped. This is frustrating for several reasons; 1) My treo from 5 years ago had a ‘disable touchscreen on call’ option, 2) the iPhone does this automatically with it’s accelerometer (the storm also has an accelerometer), 3)There is absolutely no way to change it.

Moving on from that, I plugged it into my computer to sync my contacts from outlook, it tells me there are software updates available…they took almost 45 minutes to install. Afterwards, there was no perceivable difference in either version numbers of apps or OS, and certainly not with bugs. After it was “updated” I gave it a thorough test-drive. Basic phone shit (making calls, sending SMS and MMS) work fine. There is a huge lag between the screen reorienting self from landscape to protrait and vica-versa. I tried to play a movie (it comes preloaded with one for demo purposes), the video quality is amazing, truly gorgeous. When I tried to stop the video, the screen went to static and then blank while the video sound was still playing, all buttons unresponsive. I had to wait for the video to end to get the screen controls back, that was a big fucking glitch in my mind. MP3 playback works, but it’s nothing special. When attempting to unlock the phone after a spell in a pocket, it took at least 3 attempts in landscape mode, and usually 2 in protrait…really annoying, especially on an incoming call. I also attempted to use TwitterBerry, but that ended up crashing the system, but I’m not sure it’s up to snuff for the storm just yet, I’m hoping it will come up at a later date. At that moment, I was pretty upset with the lag of display, and with the phone/face-touching thing.

But…along comes a leaked version of OS 4.7.0.75 via Crackberry. I immediately upgrade, consequences of black market software be damned, this time the update takes almost an hour. Right away, the lag was severely reduced, but not eliminated, but at least it’s tolerable now. No fix for the face-to-phone issue though, and this will be an annoyance until it’s corrected. Haven’t tried the video thing since then. Even with the update though, there is also a ridiculous lag on the camera, really really long to take a picture, renders it totally useless for anything other than still life shots.

Final Thoughts:
Pros: The phone is stunning hardware wise, it’s gorgeous, the display is amazing, the phone also has a nice weight (I picked up a curve once and thought I was going to break it, but this has some mass to it for sure).

Cons: It’s chalked full of software bugs, mundane shit that phones have had solved for years (disable touchscreen), and random other small things. The internets are ablaze with engraged customers, when MSNBC picks up on something like that, I’d like to think that RIM is doing something about it behind the scenes.

Other Pros: Announced today, Verizon will have updates later this week that will hopefully address some of these issues.

In the short term, this device was rushed to market for the holiday season and it shows. Even so, I’m happy I bought it, and I don’t plan on abandoning it anytime soon. The good news about all the problems is that none of it is hardware related (BTW, I really really like the clickable screen, it’s a great idea, and I think it was executed well) meaning that in due time all of them should be ironed out, and when the app store launches next march, I think we’ll see some really iphone/G1 competition as far as functionality goes.

Oh the plight of being an early adopter of technology…

Homeless Guy in San Francsisco: “Got any change?”
Me: “No…sorry”
Homeless Guy in San Francsisco: “Quit lying”
Me: “um, no change” *shakes pockets…no jingle*
Homeless Guy in San Francsisco: “I bet you voted for McCain too”
Me: *grits teeth, makes fist, walks away*

Some guy in SF seriously said that to me, and I seriously wanted to punch him in the face, if it weren’t for his numerous homeless friends and the worry that I might get syphilis from his teeth puncturing my hand, I might have. After that, I started thinking, where do they come from, and why in such abundance?

It is my belief, which may be narrow but I think holds true, that every single one of them made a series of bad decisions to get to where they are. Maybe they had ill educated parents? Unless the parents were homeless too, then they also have the ability to find a place to go. Perhaps they’re into drugs? Poor excuse, check into a clinic or at least commit a felony and go to jail so I don’t have to deal with you anymore. Maybe ‘The Man’ forced him down, took away his apartment for not paying rent, and then denied him access to a shower so he smells? I doubt it, they call them slums for a reason, it’s an entire section of housing that’s low income, and in most places it’s mandated by law!

So what’s the deal then? I can understand not being able to get a job once you’ve become homeless, it’s hard to look presentable for an interview like that, and you can’t list an address for your check to be mailed. But I’m not dealing with how to dig yourself out, what I want to know is how did you get there in the first place? At some point along the way, it must’ve been painfully obvious that you were headed down the wrong path. Ignorance let you keep the downward spiral, or maybe just a gripload of apathy.

Either way, something needs to be done, I felt a little intimidated in downtown SF at a decent time of night, with lots of other people around, they were very aggressive and all over the fucking place, and frankly it gave me a really poor opinion of almost the whole city. I went to see D-Rock in Haight Ashbury, far away from downtown, same situation although the age of the indigent was much younger. This further boggled my mind, how the fuck did you end up here as a 20 year old? The only logical conclusion I had was that these kids (which D-Rock lovingly calls “gutter punk”) were probably ejected from their homes by their parents for being total fuckups. So that’s it? You were such an idiot that your own flesh and blood would rather disown you than tolerate you any further. If that is the case, then the young fuckup in question is at a crossroads: On the one hand you may realize that you are in fact a total fucktard and that now is the time to go back to your parents and turn your life around -OR- on the other hand, you accept your fate and without any foresight of personal worth just continue smelling of urine and guilting the hard working people around you into supporting whatever it is you’lll be eating/drinking/stealing that day.

Get a fucking job…

People amaze me, they get stupider by the hour. Watch this video, watch the whole thing:

Really?! Being a christian is like being being stabbed with forks and electrocuted?! That has solidified my atheism fo shiz. It’s also worth noting in the last seconds of the video Grandpa John says “don’t try this at home”, does he mean Christianity or torturing vegetables? If you read all the comments, there isn’t a single one that sticks up for this poor bastard, I hope he doesn’t run a church…

Louisiana has joined the ranks of the moronic, ignorant, and divisive in epic fashion. Recently passed by the Louisiana state congress, the Louisiana Science Education Act (LSEA) gives local school boards sweeping powers to present, nay, powers to require local schools to “use supplemental textbooks and other instructional materials to help students understand, analyze, critique, and review scientific theories in an objective manner”. The theories up for review? Evolution, and global warming. Why don’t we objectively talk about the separation of church and state and how with a little legalese, you can completely subvert it. Subversion which just so happens to be written (and I mean the bill was written) by fellows of The Discovery Institute, a so-called “think tank” of pseudo-scientists based in the all-too-liberal town of Seattle. If I lived there, I know where I would defecate every day.

The nuts and bolts of this bill are that teachers will be confusing the young minds of Louisiana by tricking them into thinking that evolution is an unsupported theory with little evidence and even less backing from reputable scientists. Which, in fact, is quite the opposite of evolution. Evolution is widely accepted, and more and more of the gaps in the fossil record that the creationists rely on are filled in every god damn day. I really feel for the science teachers in that state that aren’t mentally retarted, it will degrade them inside and out to have to teach this dribble drivel (but as sloot points out, drool or drivel, both are bad). Not to mention, that with the precedent in Dover, there will be lawsuits filed immediately and statewide by the parents who care enough to save their children from the lies. The sweetest part of the deal is that the “supplemental textbooks” used to betray fact, are written and printed by…you guessed it, The Discovery Institute. Why don’t we call up one of those fucktards and ask them the age of the earth? How ’bout that? I think it may be a tad bit older than 6,000 years….FUCK MY BLOOD PRESSURE IS HIGH RIGHT NOW!

The most ironic of it all? Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal was a biology major when he attended Brown. How sad and pathetic is that? He even graduated with honors, and his former genetics professor called him up to ask him to veto the bill, he politely declined.

He either can’t read or he was paid off, no self respecting biologist believes this shit…

I, BRANDON CONDREY, HEREBY PLEDGE TO NEVER EVER LIVE IN LOUISIANA, PARTICULARLY WHEN MY CHILDREN WILL BE IN SCHOOL.

Cab fare from hotel to theater: $15
Ticket for The Happening: $9.50
Cab fare from theater to hotel: $15

Seeing M. Night Shyamalan commit petty theft of $39.50: Priceless…and infuriating

You know what some quality flicks were? The Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable, I even liked The Village. These were the works of promising young filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan. They had classic suspense, and even surprise endings, and he did it all with PG-13 ratings. Then he makes Lady in the Water, which was an ineffectual attempt to spur his career further, and instead was a long drawn out ridiculous tale of a pool nymph in an apartment complex. So, when Shyamalan has his first R rated flick come out, I held out hope that this would be the resurgence of a man who may have lost his way in Hollywood. But be goddamn sure that this R rating was for the middle Americans who can’t stand the site of blood or the sound of gunshot, according to the MPAA that movie was “rated R for violent and disturbing images.” What was truly disturbing was how tricked I was by his reputation and the marketing.

This movie wasn’t necessarily horrible, but it did not live up to the hype at all. Of course the hype was self-generated, and apparently the rest of the interwebs didn’t like it very much either. The movie goes nowhere, it leads to no climax at all, the cause of the suicides is given away in the first 15 minutes of the film. But the real kicker, the ending, was not a twist, it was an op-ed piece on how we’ve tortured our mother earth so much that the plants have evolved a suicide inducing neurotoxin and they are rebelling! The tree-hugging hippies will love this shit.

Save your money, watch the trailer, and at the end of the trailer imagine a guy on TV saying that “this is nature’s revenge, and not a terrorist attack”…boom! That’s the movie!

I just saved you $39.50