UK : The highly anticipated Blackberry® Storm 9500, the first ever touch-screen BlackBerry smartphone, purpose built exclusively for Vodafone, will be available to buy from 14th November. Available on a range of high value price-plans, the device offers consumers and business customers easy access to voice and email, a range of social media applications, multimedia content, satellite navigation and many other services on the move.
Customers who want to be the first in the UK to have a BlackBerry Storm can pre-order in Vodafone stores, online at www.vodafone.co.uk/storm and telesales, and account managers for our business customers from November 14. It will also be available for sale through Vodafone’s retail partner Phones 4U in store and online.
“We know customers are excited about the Storm and the early pre-orders really emphasise this. We continue to take orders and are excited that customers are responding so enthusiastically,” commented Ian Shepherd, consumer director, Vodafone UK. “Our customers told us that they wanted a single phone that would give them the most secure, reliable email and messaging experience possible combined with all the desirable smartphone features, and at a price that’s affordable. The BlackBerry Storm has delivered all of this and more and will give our customers incredible power in their hands to make the most of now.”
BlackBerry Storm features:
Coming in a sleek and elegant black design, the BlackBerry Storm smartphone brings together messaging services including email, SMS and MMS in a single in-box and alerts from social networks. It also offers superb sound quality and a 3.2 MP camera with video capabilities that exploit the screen’s stunning clarity to deliver advanced multi-media performance coupled with Vodafone’s fast and reliable mobile broadband network.
The BlackBerry Storm smartphone, comes with an enhanced high performance browser which delivers users a high speed web browsing experience, with desktop-style depiction in either portrait or landscape view. The new user interface combines the familiar dedicated "menu" and "escape" keys common to BlackBerry smartphones and adds support for multi-touches, taps and slides allowing the user to easily highlight, scroll, pan and zoom, making navigation fast, easy and intuitive.
The uniquely tactile 3.25” screen gives users a variety of different sense experiences. Despite its flat surface, users feel the sensation of actually pressing down on virtual keys which also light up when touched. This makes it quick and easy to type texts and emails as well as navigate through the phone’s functions. Customers will also have the choice of using a full QWERTY, SureType® or multi-tap keyboard.
By excluding the traditional physical keyboard, more space has been dedicated to the high resolution colour screen, allowing customers to display multi-media content and comfortably view attachments as well as read and edit documents.
The ground-breaking screen with its 480 x 360 pixel resolution display switches from portrait mode to landscape mode as the handset is rotated, while automatically changing the format of the keyboard from multi-tap or RIM’s SureType® to full QWERTY*. A wide range of songs and full length videos can be downloaded and enjoyed with the stunning clarity of the smartphone’s screen and its incredible, high quality audio.
The BlackBerry Storm retains the full functionality and security features of the BlackBerry platform but is also ideal for avid Facebook, MySpace and YouTube users, while Flickr fans will love the ease and speed of directly uploading their pictures seconds after taking them.
Customers can access all Vodafone’s entertainment and information services including Vodafone Music, Google Maps and Find&Go navigation, and the Vodafone live! portal, whilst also benefiting from a removable battery with excellent talk and standby time, and up to 16GB of exchangeable memory.
The BlackBerry Storm will be available from next month through Vodafone stores as well as independent outlets and online. Full pricing details will be available in the coming weeks.
* Virtual keyboards are also available in AZERTY, QWERTZ and other configurations to support different language groups.
