Neither Engadget nor Boy Genius Report gave a thumbs up to the device, both opining that for casual users the complexity would be a turn off, and for power users the features come up short.  Boy Genius Report advises folks planning to switch to play with one in the store before making the decision, and Engadget simply says “it feels undercooked — and that’s not enough for us.”

Can anyone recall seeing a BlackBerry release this badly panned before?  I certainly can’t.

Excerpts follow:

Engadget on the keyboard:

The slant from RIM’s PR on the Storm is that the new clickable touchscreen delivers another high caliber typist’s dream to their roster — but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Rather than the click making things easier, it actually makes them more difficult. As you press down to engage a “key,” you’re required to release before moving to another, which means that you can only type so quickly. In our tests, we were constantly frustrated by the staggering, laggy movement when trying to type with any speed. You have to let the click depress before you can strike another character, and that makes for a stuttery input process. Additionally, hovering over characters is represented by a blue glow, which looks nice when moving around, but in practice doesn’t do a very good job of letting you know what key you’re touching. We had spelling errors aplenty. All of this would be helped greatly by an intelligent software component that guessed what you meant to type — much like the iPhone’s predictive element. Unfortunately, what RIM provides is more of a glorified T9, which means if you type “fo,” it doesn’t know you meant to type “do.” Ultimately we found ourselves slowly and carefully pecking out messages that should have taken less time to put together, clicking screen or not.

Boy Genius Report on the keyboard:

This is going to be a hate or love it experience again, and we really aren’t feeling it since we’re power users. We would have loved a straight capacitive screen here. The button presses get tiring after you type a lot and we find that we just want to type less in general than we do on our Bolds and Curves. (I’m not going to out the one lone writer here at BGR who still has a Curve.) Here’s the issue… if you’re in SureType mode it’s not that bad, but when you switch to landscape mode, your finger covers up the letters and blue halo does little to reassure you what letter you’ve selected. The other issue is the actual hardware. I took apart the unit and found that there is one button in the middle of the screen which explains why it is so damn hard to press the screen on the edges. If you need to type an “a” key or “z” key or even select a menu option that’s on the edge of the screen, you will have to press very, very hard. This makes it really a chore to use sometimes.

The auto-correction on here is a total joke and barely works for anything we’re trying to type, and you just can’t type fast. Your typing speed is hardware-limited.

Engadget on the browser:

Thankfully the browser has been considerably updated. If you have any experience with RIM’s last attempt at mobile browsers (the Bold), then you know what manna from heaven any fixes would be. 4.6’s browser is, in a word, unusable. Load times are painful, rendering is only sometimes accurate, and mostly it’s just a tortuous mess to get around in. We can honestly say that the Storm’s implementation is leaps and bounds beyond what the company has previously offered. Pages load quickly and are generally formatted correctly, navigation is much snappier (zooms don’t take hours to redraw), and scrolling is tolerable, if not as buttery smooth as we prefer. And ultimately, that’s a point that must be made — while the browser is much better than earlier versions, and is an admirable attempt, it’s still a bit behind Mobile Safari and the G1’s Webkit-based “Chrome light,” lacking support for more advanced features like multiple tabs. Why RIM doesn’t build something from scratch (or buy a license from Opera) is a question for the ages — we can’t imagine anyone has any real affection for this experience. Still, for casual tasks and most browsing, you could certainly do worse, and it’s nice to know that a lot of energy went into this update.

Boy Genius Report on the browser:

We’re sorry, WebKit, what? There’s no way in hell this thing is based on WebKit (contrary to rumors from a little while ago) because honestly, it’s the same exact browser that’s on the Bold. Problems loading large pages, death by JavaScript, and so on. Now, the browser isn’t terrible and if you are keeping score, it’s the best browser RIM has ever offered. We just don’t think that’s enough in this day and age, especially when you are trying to go head-to-head with you-know-what. It’s true. Can the browser get you by? Sure. Is it something you want to use? Not so much.

One of the main gripes with the browser is navigation. In most applications there are scroll up and scroll down keys at the bottom of the screen. This is completely necessary in the browser and it’s not available here. What makes matters worse is that like we mentioned, scrolling stops when your finger stops. If you have to scroll down an entire decently-sized webpage, you might need to check yourself an appointment with a BlackBerry thumb / finger therapist because it’s tiring! An easy trick is to flick up the on screen keyboard and use the space key to page down, but what’s the fun in that? We want real scrolling on here.

Boy Genius Report on the UI:

There have definitely been some problems with the UI of the Storm, for us at least. We can’t help but feel like it was designed for three year-olds with tiny fingers. There’s been so many occasions where you think you are hitting the right selection but your touch registers the option below it. This makes it difficult to get things done sometimes because SurePress is effectively rendered useless in those situations. For instance, you want to hit Screen/Keyboard in options, yet it hits Security Options instead. Sure, you can slowly get the right selection down and then press in the screen. But if you’re in a hurry and just want to quickly browse, you should be prepared for some erroneous touch events.

Boy Genius Report on the Application Center:

Let’s get negative for a second. The Application Center is probably the stupidest thing we’ve ever seen attempted by RIM. It honestly is. First off, it’s carrier-driven, meaning you can kiss all those applications that matter good bye. That’s not the worst part, though. The kicker is that while it shows a list of applications to install, and show you when upgrades are available, you still have to go in the browser to download them! And we’re not talking like, launch the browser, click one button. We’re talking about accepting RIM’s nutjob three pages of terms and conditions! Absolutely a complete failure and not even worth the effort. Just hit up mobile.blackberry.com and save yourself the trouble. Really, really disappointing.

Boy Genius Report on the OS:

We’ve said this along, and it’s true. The Storm is a Bold with a touch screen. That’s not necessarily bad, but it doesn’t bode well for RIM who really needs to step their OS up with so many new competitors. The iPhone is popular for a reason. Yes, it’s an Apple product. But getting beyond that, there’s a complete almost desktop-class OS on there that has limitless possibilities. From the networking stack, to the SDK, to the UI, to Safari, they’ve got a pretty serious thing going on. 4.7 is 4.6 is 4.5 is 4.2 more or less. The fundamentals are the same, and the way the OS works is the same. It’s great if you love the default applications and have no complaints, but until RIM really steps the OS up and gives developers the right APIs they need to access you’re not going to see any good 3rd party applications. Yeah, we said it! It’s a pretty bad thing when all the developers that want to develop great applications (SlingMedia, Qik, Skyfire) all need RIM’s assistance because they can’t develop anything on their own.

As previously noted, the Rogers Customer Relations department has some latitude in pricing.  However, even the representative that I worked with was unable to discount the iPhone to the advertised price.  She recommended that I port the number to FIDO, and buy a new iPhone there — saving $30 in termination fees in the process.   However, FIDO’s rates are a little higher than Rogers.  In the end, rather than discounting the iPhone, she credited $100 in service to one of my other Rogers mobiles, bringing the total bill to $236 for the iPhone.  It still wasn’t the advertised $199, but it was close enough.

And then we got onto figuring out the service plan.  A half an hour later, with several pages of notes written out in my notebook, I had a headache, mostly all the features we wanted, and was spending a couple of bucks more per month.

The worst part?  I pick on Rogers, but I don’t believe that they’re that different from any other carrier — at least in Canada.

There are two lessons here for marketers.

1. Clarity in pricing actually matters.  Rogers can abuse its position as the monopoly provider of GSM phones in Canada for now, but heaven help them if there’s ever an alternative.  Give a consumer a clear value proposition with a clear and simple price, and you will have more sales, guaranteed.  So far as mobile phones go, that day can’t come soon enough for consumers.

2. Complex option packages, while popular with bean counters and MBA’s, are deeply unpopular with consumers.  I spent close to 1 hour with a service representative sorting through these details.  It was a colossal waste of time for me, and an unnecessary expense for Rogers that could have been avoided by simplification.  Moreover, there were several times that I nearly exploded at the perversity of Rogers pricing models.  It couldn’t have been fun to be the person assigned to serve me.

Bottom line: Buying my son an iPhone should have taken 15 minutes. In the end it was hours of work spread over a three week period, due to the complex pricing model Rogers has chosen for iPhone.  A less persistent individual might have walked.

When we built the pricing model for our Calliflower Conferencing Service we had several discussions about option packages.  In the end we opted for simplicity.  The premium version of Calliflower sells for $50/month, for 2 users, and $25/month for every user after that.  And for that price you get unlimited calls and unlimited document sharing sessions, with as many people as you want.

Options?  Who needs ‘em!

This past Sunday we returned to the store, and tried again.  We made some progress but still didn’t walk away with an iPhone.  This time we were eligible, but the price quoted was $349, not the $199 prominently displayed on the web site.  “Fine,” I responded.  “Just cancel the old SIM and we’ll get a new one at the $199 new customer rate.”  After all, the old SIM was out of contract anyway.

To cancel the old SIM Rogers requires you to speak with customer service, and pay a $30 cancellation fee.   It can’t be done in the store.  The young woman behind the counter obligingly telephoned customer service, only to discover that they’re not open on Sundays.

So, beginning to feel a bit like Oliver Twist we left, a second time, with no iPhone.

This morning I called the customer service number that had been supplied, and was confronted by a woman who asked “what do you want?”, fairly brusquely. She was obviously having a bad day.   I explained what I was trying to do, and was informed that “All of our systems are being upgraded.  I can only answer general questions.  I don’t have access to your account, and therefore can’t answer any questions about pricing or your account.”

I asked how long the system would be down, and was instructed to call back in another two hours.

I’m not going to ask the obvious question, which is how Rogers can run their business with the call centre down for two hours on a Monday morning.  We’re simply trying to buy my boy an iPhone at the advertised price, and Rogers apparently has the phones.

Or maybe they don’t… brings to mind the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch.

• the carrier competitors,  excepting Vonage, ran out of money.  Vonage hasn’t run out of money, but it’s always touch and go with them.
• the companies developing applications that needed carrier support for distribution in order to really prosper have either sold or closed their doors.  In some cases, they were sold and then closed their doors.

And then there’s the oddball — the much lamented Pulvermedia, now reduced to a landing page sporting advertisements for Israeli entrepreneurs and colon cleansing treatments.  As go the fortunes of the industry, so go the fortunes of those who provide services to the industry.

Any guesses as to who the owner of that sock is?  Here’s a hint — a bunch of folks from the “rebel telecom” universe got together on Wednesday night in San Francisco, courtesy of an invitation from Lee Dryburgh, founder of the eComm conference.  One was wearing these socks.

In all there were over 50 people in the room at that dinner, representing companies that are variously developing solutions, go-to-market strategies, and providing consulting services many of which are independent of carriers.  Apple’s success on mobile, coupled with the clear demonstration that one doesn’t need to be a carrier or partner with a carrier in order to succeed in telecom applications, has emboldened many to try again.

In contrast, earlier that afternoon at Under the Radar, a panel of carrier representatives from AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile variously made excuses for the way in which they lock down their devices and customer usage models. Chief among the excuses — “preserving the customer experience”. “What if the customer loaded an application that used too much battery?”, asked AT&T’s Rupert Young. One indignant audience member elicited loud cheers when he stood to tell Mr. Young that in fact it ought to be his right to load such an application if he felt that it provided value to him.     Later, when moderator Jeremy Toeman turned to the audience and asked how many folks in the audience would disagree with the statement that the carriers on stage provided “a great user experience” to their customers, every hand in the room shot up.

Over lunch a day earlier, VantagePoint Venture Partners Eric Ver Ploeg praised one entrepreneur’s business model because it wasn’t dependent on the carrier for success.  To Ver Ploeg that model held out the possibility that the business could scale quickly, at Silicon Valley speeds, rather than telecom speeds.

That innovators in the telecom world might chafe at carrier restrictions is not, in and of itself, news.  Times are changing, however.  These entrepreneurs are noisier now than at any other time that I remember. And that VC’s might eschew the carrier distribution model certainly is news. The real question we should be asking is whether this a fundamental shift in viewpoint, or merely an artifact of Apple’s successes today? How will the carriers react?  Will they behave as AT&T did, allowing Apple to establish an outside distribution channel, or will they do as Verizon’s Jennifer Byrne suggested, which was to establish a Verizon specific channel and platform?  Ms. Byrne also, perhaps unintentionally, dismissed the iPhone App Store as “nice UI”, leaving one with the impression that she fundamentally doesn’t understand the needs of developers and the impact that App Store is having on the community of innovators.

More than ever this battle is important to the colourful entrepreneurs, innovators and service providers that dot the telecom industry — the folks like Jeff Pulver and the mysterious owner of that sock.  With luck, between the iPhone team at Apple, the Android team at Google, and soon RIM with their Blackberry store, a sufficiently large market may emerge that is unencumbered by carrier restrictions. In turn, that may provide sufficient opportunity for developers that mobile applications might avoid a repeat of the crash and failure of the VoIP industry.

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• BlackBerry maker battles back

Meetings aren’t singular events.  They’re part of a repetitive cycle that moves business initiatives forward — organize, prepare, facilitate, share information, follow up and so on — that we have dubbed Active Conversations.

Users have told us that their overwhelming unmet need was not to have another point solution, but to have a single tool that could manage these complex Active Conversations. And when we looked at the market, most of the innovations being introduced are actually isolated features in search of integration solution — coordination, the audio call itself, document sharing, and text messaging to name a few examples.

Today at Under the Radar, we’re introducing that complete solution.  We’re making three announcements.

First, Calliflower has gone mobile, and is now accessible wherever you are. You can download it now for free until the end of the year from the Apple app store.  Apple willing, it will be in the store at any moment.

Second, Calliflower Premium is also launching today. Its signature feature is drop dead easy document sharing.  Clientless and seamlessly integrated with Calliflower, it supports collaborative markup, and… because Calliflower Conversations are active conversations, it creates a persistent record of those documents, annotations and markups for later reference.

For $50 dollars per month you get the document sharing plus local dial in numbers, unlimited conference calls and two conference accounts that you can that you can use at anytime. Every additional user on your account costs just 25 dollars more. Users can have a third party organize the meeting on their behalf and can conduct two separate conference calls simultaneously. And the first 30 days are free.

The pricing model for Calliflower Premium is truly disruptive.  In our trials, customers are saving hundreds of dollars per month on their conference calling usage, and they love the new features.  It’s a dynamite combination.

Third, with your Calliflower Premium subscription, you also get access to our global dial-in network.  We have 8 countries here today, but we’ll be rolling more out as fast as possible.

So, there you have it.  A mobile application, a new premium version with a disruptive pricing model, and a global expansion.  We’ve been really busy for the last few months, but this particular combination of document sharing, unlimited flat rate calling and a mobile application are just what customers have told us they wanted.  Let us know what YOU think!

This morning we talked with Voxbone CEO Rod Ullens about the launch of their iNum service that provides a single country agnostic number under the +883 country code. An iNum number takes advantage of Voxbone’s IP-based intercontinental network such that calls from any location worldwide are either free or at a very low cost.

Rod spent some time outlining the key features and benefits of the service, how calls are made and the general rollout plans for this service. Spokespersons from four iNum Service Provider Partners - Voxeo, Mobivox, Truphone and OnState discussed how they will be using the service and their rollout plans. Of course, iotum’s CalliFlower will also announce  Wednesday their implementation of Voxbone’s service for access to Calliflower conference calls such as this one.

On the Calliflower Conference Call today: Jim Courtney (Moderator), Dan York, Kevin Baggs, Jeb Brilliant, Sheryl Breuker, Tom Carter, Luca Filigheddu, Carl Ford, Jason Harris, Brad Jones, Pat Kelly, William Volk, Peter Diedrich, Larry Lisser, Nabeel Jafferi, Sergio Meinardi.

VoxBone has announced that they’re rolling out the first iNum services today.  Wholesale carriers Arbinet, Belgacom ICS, Level 3 Communications and Stealth’s Voice Peering Fabric have all signed up to route +883 numbers.  Service providers including Jajah, Mobivox, Gizmo5, Ribbit, Rebtel, Voipbuster, Voxeo, Voipuser and we at iotum, have also signed up to use it.

What this means for Calliflower users is that you will be able to dial into a Calliflower conference call from anywhere in the world via our +883 number using services like Gizmo5, Mobivox, Jajah, and so on.  Stay tuned for more on that shortly.

Join Jim Courtney at 11 AM EST today to chat with VoxBone CEO Rod Ullens about this topic on the SquawkBox.

“How much data are you likely to consume on your trip, Sir?”, she asked.

“I don’t know”, said Howard.  “How much would a gigabyte cost?”

“Umm….”, came the reply “$6,000.  Let me just double check that for you.  (pause) yes sir, it actually is $6,000″.

For what?  So that AT&T and Rogers can exchange billing records?

Now you know why I’m no fan of locked mobile phones.  Nope, not at all.  I’ll take an unlocked phone over a locked phone any day.

Almost better than getting an unlocked phone, however, is the special pleasure of unhooking a phone from the claws of the grasping carrier who tried to lock you in in the first place.  That’s why this photo makes me so happy. It’s my Rogers iPhone, running on AT&T’s network using an old Cingular SIM that I had.

I have my pal Pat Phelan to thank for this one.  It was he who told me about Rebelsim, and sent me one of their cards.  Rebelsim is a thin, flexible circuit board that you combine with your existing SIM and insert into any mobile.  When the phone queries the SIM to find out which network it’s running on, Rebelsim takes over and passes back the expected network identifier.  Or at least, that’s how it appears.

The net result? I’m using my Rogers iPhone on AT&T’s network, and paying AT&T’s freight instead of $6,000/Gigabyte.  When I get back to Canada, I’ll just pop my Rogers SIM back in and use their much more affordable at-home data service.

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• iPhone 3G unlocked? [UPDATED]

Norah Jones

Nose jammed deep into a bowl of salty sweet udon, and listening to Norah Jones on my iPhone, I’ve been reflecting on the nature of conversations.  What makes talk into a conversation?  Does a conversation continue after the talking?  If so, what do you call the piece that continues?  If the conversation requires preparation, organization, or facilitation beforehand to make it valuable, is that also part of the conversation?

With my friends Bill Ryan and Andy Abramson we’ve been tossing around a concept which we’ve collectively dubbed Active Conversations which describe these ideas.  The key idea is simply this: a conversation is more than just talking.  It’s an iterative process of organization, preparation, facilitation, agreement, conclusions, actions, and follow up.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

It’s easy to see how this applies in a business context.  So often a business conversation finishes with not just a conclusion, but a series of action items leading to the organization of another meeting or conference call.  It’s incredibly rare to see a business conversation not result in follow on actions.  After all, that’s the engine that runs business.

But what about in the context of a podcast?  This week I’ve had the opportunity to chat with both Steve Gillmor and Sean Ammirati about their podcasts. Both are users of Calliflower, and I was interested in previewing some features we’re working on with them, as well as hearing feedback on how to improve Calliflower.  Needless to say, the idea of Active Conversations was at the forefront of my thinking as we were talking.  Podcasts, especially the way that Steve and Sean run Gillmor Gang / Newsgang and ReadWriteTalk respectively, are very much Active Conversations.  With a guest, multiple participants, chat walls, a follow up posting, comments, and a follow-on conversation these are quite definitely Active Conversations.

What other kinds of conversations are Active Conversations? Stay tuned… I’ll have more thoughts on this in the coming days.

1. The battle to own the presentation layer of the Web was lost long ago.  That presentation layer is controlled by the W3C not by any one company.  The industry, including Microsoft and Netscape, learned how damaging proprietary extensions could be during mid 90’s, and both companies vowed to support standards.
2. Notwithstanding standards, innovation can occur in browsers - rendering speed, add-on features, and so-on.  Apple and Google are proving this.  This is the ripe area for plucking right now, as opposed to spending resources on getting the latest HTML standard to render correctly.
3. Microsoft’s decision to push its own rendering engine is causing it immense harm in mobile.  Speaking as the CEO of a company with a browser based application, and mobile projects underway, the platforms that interest us the most are iPhone, Android and Nokia.  These are the easiest for us to support. What about Microsoft and RIM, both of which have substantial market share? BlackBerry is almost there.  RIM’s choice to build a proprietary browser, however, is working against them.  And Microsoft? Well, we don’t even IE 6 well on a desktop platform, let alone mobile. My bet is that modern mobile browsers are going to win the day.

So give it some more thought Steve (and Steve).  The IE rendering engine holds little strategic value, little opportunity for innovation, and it’s an impediment to developers supporting your mobile platforms.