BlackBerry 9530 Smartphone

My seventeen year old son and I went into Verizon wireless to upgrade our phones. We have been Verizon customers for about nine years. I am the type of person that a phone is just that, a phone. I don’t need all the other fancy gadgets. I want a phone that if I have an emergency away from home, I have a phone to use. I don’t need a phone to play games, or get on the internet, or check my email, or do the other of numerous other things phones do today. Now my seventeen year old on the other hand thinks a phone should do it all. So obviously when we went into Verizon, we went in looking for totally different phones. My son really wanted a blackberry.  I was against it as I didn’t think he needed such a phone but he was persistent and got to me, so I purchased him the Blackberry Storm 9530. We purchased our new phones in March of 2009.

Our experience with the Blackberry Storm has not been a good one. My son has gotten two replacement phones as he has had issues with his Storm. About a month after receiving his Storm, he started having issues with his phone shutting off or rebooting for no reason.  I thought it was just an excuse as it always seemed to be when I was trying to get a hold of him but that was not the case. In June of the same year, his Storm died and we had to get it replaced. Since it was under warranty, we got a new Storm.

This Storm has lasted a bit longer then the last but last month he started having issues again. The same problems were occurring. His phone would shut off for no reason or get hung up. He would pull the battery and reset it and it would work for some time. One day he got an error message on the phone and called Verizon. They were unable to fix the issue and sent him another phone.  He has had his new Storm for about two weeks but he is ready to replace it.

The Blackberry Storm is a nice looking, sleek phone. It is only available to Verizon customers.

Out of the box the Blackberry Storm comes with a black handset, removable battery, charger, USB cable, 8 GB MicroSD card, and a user manual. The Storm measures 4.43 x 2.45 x 0.55 inches and weighs a bit over 5 ounces. The Storm is lightweight and easy to carry. The Storm has a 1400 mAh lithium-ion battery which is suppose to give you up to 6 hours of talk time and 15 days of standby time.

Once you receive your phone you will need to set it up. This is a bit time consuming but a necessary step. It took us about a half an hour to set up the phone.

The Blackberry Storm is a touch screen phone. This is one thing I don’t like about the phone. I find it harder to use a touch screen phone compared to a “regular” phone. I have used my son’s phone numerous times and I find it harder to navigate. Now my son had no problems navigating the touch screen phone and actually found it easy to use. He really liked this feature of the phone. The screen itself is clear and easy to read.

The Blackberry Storm supports Internet access and Verizon Wirelesses multimedia services. You can download songs to your phone which I feel is totally unnecessary. Of course my son disagrees and uses this service a lot. You can also download videos, news and weather. The weather function is the only function that I do find useful. My youngest son races go karts and it is nice to be able to pull up the weather on the Storm instead of pulling out my laptop and checking it out.

The Storm is also GPS enabled. The phone is also capable of text messaging, picture messaging and instant messaging. You can also subscribe to visual voice mail but we did not.  The Storm does not include Wi-Fi either.

The Storm has a speak phone, Bluetooth connectivity, media player, 3.2 megapixel camera which features a flash, auto focus and can capture video. You can also use your phone as a modem for your laptop. The Blackberry Storm has good sound quality and picture quality.

The battery life of the Storm was acceptable but not great. We had to charge the phone nightly but then again my son used his phone a lot.

I pay around $80 per month for my son’s Blackberry Storm plan. This does include unlimited data and text messaging. The data and text messaging are additional expenses as is the GPS function. Personally I think this all should be included with the cost of your monthly bill but it is not. We have had Verizon service for nine years and do have occasional problems with the service but nothing major. We live back in the mountains and there are certain areas where the phone will drop.

When we purchased the Blackberry Storm it was selling for $199.00. I received $100 off the phone plus we got a $50.00 rebate. They were also running a special that if you bought one Storm you could get another Blackberry free but we did not take advantage of this offer.

Maybe we were just unlucky with our Blackberry Storm and got two bad ones in a years time but we were not happy with the technical problems with had with the phone. About three weeks after getting his second replacement Storm we upgraded to a different phone. The reason my children have phones is so that I can get in touch with them or if they have an emergency they can get in touch with others. The Blackberry Storm was not reliable as we never knew if it would work from day to day.

Due to the phone being unreliabe I would not recommend the Blackberry Storm 9530 to others.