There’s been a lot of hullaballoo about the BlackBerry Storm over the last couple of weeks. David Pogue, normally so mild mannered, used his print column to lambast the device from several different directions. Another example of the kind of critiques that have been going around is here.

Pogue’s column generated a fair amount of both commendation and condemnation according to his latest blog post, and understandably so. He seemed unusually vituperative about the device compared with his normal even handedness, and you sensed a certain amount of annoyance at the way Verizon Wireless refused to acknowledge the bugs in the device and that this annoyance might have colored the rest of his commentary. At the same time, many users (including me) seem to have experienced similar problems and he gave their frustration voice.

All in all, I agree with some of what Pogue said but don’t feel quite as strongly about it all as he did. I like a number of things about the device:

• the exterior is very attractive – both front and back – the black glassy finish over the front looks nice and sleek and the brushed metal finish on the battery cover adds further class. Feels more solid than the Curve and a number of other recent BlackBerries.
• The user interface is also attractive, although the default Verizon red is a little offputting. The new wireframe icons that debuted with the Bold and continued with the Flip are here too and look pretty good on the whole (although downloaded applications still use the same logos they always have, making them look out of place among the minimalist native ones)
• The email and other PIM functions BlackBerries are famous for are still first class.

But there are a number of problems with the device, too, and the main one is the implementation of the touch screen. I’ve never understood why anyone thought tactile feedback was a useful thing with a touchscreen. If tactile feedback is your thing, then you should really buy a device with a keyboard. If you like touchscreens you don’t get tactile feedback and that’s just fine. What does that tactile feedback do for you anyway? If you hit the wrong key on the virtual keyboard (or more likely in the Storm’s case, select the wrong item in a menu) the feedback is the same – the same clicky sound you’d have got if you hit the right key or selected the right menu item. The Sprint Instinct tried to solve the same perceived problem in a different way – with “haptic” feedback (little vibrations confirming virtual key presses) which was just as useless and also a little distracting.

RIM has made the mistake of assuming that people who want a touchscreen are actually closet QWERTY keyboard addicts. Even if they pretend they’re willing to forego the keyboard they really want a clicky feel afterall – they’re just in denial. No. They actually prefer the flexibility of a keyboard and have made a deliberate decision to do without the clicky keyboard, thank you very much. If I wanted both a touchscreen and a keyboard I’d have bought a Treo.

I had the same issues as David Pogue as regards using the virtual keyboard and the touchscreen in general. Coming from the iPhone (which is my main personal device) the two-layered touchscreen (selection via regular touch, action via hard push) was unintutive – I kept finding myself wondering why things weren’t happening after I had clearly touched the screen as indicated by the on-screen highlighting on the object touched. Admittedly, one would get used to this after a while, but it also takes considerably more effort to push the screen down to the point of clicking compared with other touch screens, which would get old quickly and tiring soon after.

Then there’s the portrait mode implementation of the virtual keyboard, where the device uses the Suretype keyboard layout instead of just a more tightly spaced QWERTY layout as the iPhone does. This is frustrating for those of us who don’t regularly use suretype or other predictive text keyboards. And using the keyboard in landscape mode takes up so much of the screen as to be useless too.

RIM should have realised that, in other areas too, other touchscreen phones – especially the iPhone – have now defined the expected user experience. In Google Maps and the web browser, multi-touch commands like pinching are now the norm on other devices, but not on the Storm. You double-click (as with the iPhone) to zoom, but have to hit the back button to zoom out again (never would have figured that one out on my own). As with the Bold, where this also annoyed me, even perfectly visible links can’t be clicked on until you’ve zoomed into the page – an issue you don’t have with the iPhone where precision finger clicking can be done when in full page view of a webpage.

The acceleromter-powered screen rotation is either much too slow or much too eager – taking ages to turn when you rotate the device very deliberately but constantly switching to landscape mode when you so much as look at the device at a different angle. I don’t know how RIM has managed to create both problems at once but they have.

I’ll stop complaining there – I actually like the device a lot, and a lot of its foibles just take some getting used to. But it really feels like RIM was making a device for reluctant touchscreen users instead of touchscreen enthusiasts, and as a result has rather handicapped what could have been a much more compelling device. Instead of trying to reinvent the full-screen touch device, it should have recognised that Apple defined that space with the iPhone, creating certain expectations, and that the best BlackBerry could do was match the iPhone for ease of use and design and improve on it with all the stuff BlackBerries do best. Instead of which, they’ve combined a sub-par interface with those BlackBerry goodies and come out behind the iPhone instead of in front of it, at least for this user.

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Harold Wilson, who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for parts of the 1960s and 1970s, coined the phrase, “A week is a long time in politics”. I was reminded of that phrase when I read a post just now by David Pogue, the New York Times’ tech columnist about a new book about Microsoft by Mary Jo Foley. Foley posted about the key issue on her own blog as follows:

As I mentioned in the conclusion of Microsoft 2.0, I had just submitted the final version of my book manuscript a week before Microsoft announced its $44 billion bid to buy Yahoo.

Disbelief was followed by utter despair — and not just on Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang’s part. All I could think on February 1 was I was going to have to go back and revise every single one of my 300-plus pages.

I did go back in and update my chapters to reflect the possibility Microsoft might end up buying Yahoo. Then I revised again to say Microsoft did buy Yahoo (given that much of the press in February made it sound like it was pretty much a done deal). Right before my drop-dead go-to-printer date, I revised one last time, saying that Microsoft might or might not buy Yahoo.

Well, as we now know, on May 3, Microsoft withdrew its takeover bid, after being unwilling to meet the higher per-share price that the Yahoo board was demanding.

So this poor woman completed her book on Microsoft, then the Yahoo! bid was announced, she made a bunch of changes to incorporate the seemingly inevitable acquisition and submitted the final version, and then Microsoft called the whole thing off. What a miserable experience, and presumably one which will greatly damage sales of her book.

But all this makes me wonder how much it’s really possible to predict the future in the world of technology. If a week is a long time in politics, it can sometimes be an eon in tech. We’re being asked now for our research publication plans for 2009. The year won’t even start for another seven months, and won’t end for 19 months, and yet we’re supposed to predict the broad outlines of what we’ll publish that far ahead. I just can’t imagine that we’ll be able to do an accurate job of forecasting what’s we’ll publish in late 2009, and yet clients will not doubt want to hold us to at least some of it regardless of whether it’s the most relevant or interesting research to be publishing that far down the road.

Of course, we publish forecasts with a five-year time horizon and generally think we have a good handle on future trends. And in terms of Internet penetration, or wireless subscribers, or MPLS ports, that’s actually fairly straightforward to do. Occasionally, we might buy into the hype around a new product or service too much or underestimate the growth in an unexpectedly hot market. But on the whole those long-term product and service trends are relatively straightforward. They tend to grow in a steady fashion after they cross the famous chasm and so are relatively easy to predict with a reasonable degree of accuracy.

But predicting industry news, actions of specific players and especially mergers and acquisitions is much more art than science, and would take a real crystal ball and not the analyst’s metaphorical one to foretell accurately. This is why it’s important in our job as analysts to separate one from the other. We can still do the forecasting bit, and we can certainly talk about whether it would be wise for a particular company to pursue a certain course. But we shouldn’t really be in the business of predicting decisions or performance by a particular company unless we have real inside information (in which case we probably shouldn’t anyway).

We all have a lot of work to do in providing balance between these various things that we do, but we also need to be honest with our audiences about what we can reasonably do and what we should leave to others more willing to peddle their fortune telling skills.

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David Pogue has a nice (or awful, depending on your perspective) example from one of his readers of woeful tech support, delivered via one of those “live chat” applications which are springing up all over the place. When combined with the remote delivery of said tech support (in this case, the tech support guy’s name was purportedly “Sean” but who knows whether he was sitting in New York or New Delhi) this makes for some bad results. I’ve certainly had several of these experiences myself, which can mix the worst of IM/SMS jargon and generally bad English.

This is another of those examples where the internally-facing (or at least shareholder-facing) prerogative to save money on customer support is in conflict with the external-(customer)-facing prerogative of customer satisfaction. Live chat can be a boon – since it’s live you rarely have to wait, in comparison with call centres. But it can also make for a much worse experience once you actually get going. And more than once I’ve been told that I need to chat or even talk with a different department once I’m halfway through the live chat I thought would get me what I needed. More thought needed from all the companies involved in this stuff.

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