BlackBerry Storm 2 review

As you'd expect the media experience on the BlackBerry Storm 2 is pretty good, which is necessary as it's a very big reason as to why the phone is devoid of a QWERTY keypad.

Music

The music player on the Storm 2 is pretty basic, but does the job with aplomb and pumps out your tunes the way you want them, which is all we can ask for in such a device.

The opening of the music player gives access to a well laid out list of songs by Artist, Album and even Genre, with a 'Shuffle Songs' option included so you can play your whole collection on a random loop.

The interface for each song is nice too, with nothing more than necessary information displayed on the screen. This means nice and large album art, a touchscreen scrollbar to skip through the song and easy to press track management buttons, such as play, pause and shuffle.

Another nice feature is the ability to click an artist's name and hold it down - doing this activates a search that brings up all other songs by said artist, which is neat if you have hundreds of songs on your BlackBerry Storm 2. The bundled 2GB card will hold a fair few, but we'd advise upgrading if you want a decent amount of videos on there too.

Video

Speaking of video, the movie player is similarly good when it comes to media on the BlackBerry Storm 2. In fact, it's better than good - we're impressed with how clear it looks on the HVGA screen, compared to smaller, more high-res options on the market, such as the LG Crystal.

There's not a huge amount more to say on the video player other than it does what you'd expect it would, ie play a large amount of video formats and size them easily to fit the screen nicely. It supports MPEG4, WMV, H.263 and H.264 formats, so you'll need to convert your AVI files to get them working on the phone.

Having a 3.5mnm headphone jack helps enormously in this situation, as you don't have to worry about using an adaptor or Bluetooth headphones.

However, we did test out a pair of Jabra Halos, and while the Storm 2 did struggle to connect to them at first, once paired wireless music worked like a dream for both music and video.

There's sadly no FM radio on board as far as we can see, so this won't be the device you take to football with you to listen to the commentary while you watch your team lose time and again.