When the original Blackberry Storm launched last year, RIM's first touchscreen phone promised to throw itself into the arena with the iPhone and the rest of the stylish smartphone crew. But its innovative SurePress screen, which had to be physically pushed inwards to activate controls, alienated more people than it won over, with users complaining that it felt loose, and there were also a few build quality issues. Now it's back in an improved version with the Blackberry Storm2 9520, which also adds WiFi and some social networking integration.

Handset

At 112.5mm x 62.2mm x 13.95mm and 160g the Storm2 is slightly bigger and heavier than its predecessor, gaining 5mm in length and width plus an extra 5g. The increase is barely noticeable though, since the edges of the Storm2 have received an extra bevelling, making it appear a little smaller, if anything. The four nav buttons (call start and end, back and menu) have now been incorporated into the bottom of the screen and while it has the same buttons around the sides (volume rocker, camera shutter, programmable voice control button) they're now covered by a surround of black rubberised plastic. The MicroUSB power/sync slot is the same, though the 3.5mm headphone jack has now been absorbed more fully into the casing and the touch-sensitive lock and mute buttons on top remain unchanged.

Screen

The transmissive 3.25in LCD touchscreen received a lot of criticism for what is actually quite a good idea. The physical act of pushing the screen down until it clicks makes distinguishing between a brush and a press simple and intuitive, but the original Storm's 'floating' SurePress screen just felt as though it might be broken, since it moved around so much. The new version is more sensitive, with four sensors under it rather than one, and requires much less travel to activate. It also has limited multi-touch ability, allowing you to press in two places at once, though it doesn't have the pinch-to-zoom capability of the iPhone or HTC HD2. It still clicks though, which is bound to alienate some.

Keyboard

For such a message-oriented device, we were a little surprised that the onscreen keyboard wasn't perfect. It's not that it's bad, with four lines of well-spaced keys, but those keys seemed just a smidgeon too far apart, making them ever so slightly smaller than we would have liked for accuracy. They light up with a blue glow as your thumbs pass over them but this system isn't quite as easy to use as the iPhone's big letter flags. You can get up a decent head of typing steam though, and the multi-touch capability means you can tap away without having to wait for individual letters to appear before pressing the next one. There's also a neat 'floating cursor' which allows you to press the start and end of a piece of text you want to highlight before editing.

Messaging

BlackBerry's push email capabilities are still second to none, and it's easy to set up as many as 10 email accounts with just address and password. BlackBerry's Enterprise Server also allows access to compatible corporate accounts. Facebook has been partially integrated with the ability to transfer pictures and updates to your BlackBerry contacts, though there's no way to transfer all of your Facebook contacts at once if they're not already mirrored on the BlackBerry – you'll have to transfer them individually, which is a bit of a pain.

Operating system

The latest BlackBerry 5.0 operating system is on board and accessing apps is generally very quick, due in part to the 528MHz Qualcomm processor backed by 256MB of Flash memory, which is twice as much as the original Storm could muster.

Browser

BlackBerry's browser is generally pretty good, though we were surprised that pages seemed to take considerably longer to render than we found on the recent BlackBerry Bold 9700, whether we were accessing the web via broadband over WiFi (bizarrely left off the original Storm) or HSDPA 3G. Zoom controls are available on screen and the onboard accelerometer is quick to flip the resolution to landscape when you turn it on its side. The SurePress system works well online, ensuring that you don't activate links by accident as you're browsing, but there's no support for Flash video, which leads to some pages rendering inaccurately.

Camera

The 3.2 megapixel camera is much the same as we saw on the original Storm, which is to say that it offers few frills, but reasonably impressive picture quality. You'll need good light, but the autofocus and image stabilisation help to produce images that are sharp and reasonably detailed, though noise creeps in pretty quickly in poor light conditions, which the LED flash is ill-equipped to counter. It's quick to start though, ready to go in two seconds after you press the shutter button, and once you've taken your pic there is the option to crop it or to send it via email, MMS, Facebook or Twitter.

Media

The screen offers 360 x 480-pixel resolution with 65,000 colours and renders videos very well. Colours are vibrant and edges are satisfyingly sharp, though there's no option to resize videos to fit the screen if they haven't been optimised already. The media player can handle MPEG4, H.263, H.264 and WMV files but unfortunately not AVI or DivX, which you'll need to convert before playing.

The music player is nicely intuitive and quite a good looker with its minimalist graphics. It can play MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and WMA files and sound quality is surprisingly good through the supplied headphones, though you can add your own via the 3.5mm headphone jack or stereo Bluetooth connection. Fortunately, there's a 2GB microSD card on board, though you can bump this up to 32GB if you feel the need.

Battery

Battery life was nothing stunning, barely granting us a day and a half of moderate use, though it's probably not much below similarly specced smart phones.

The BlackBerry Storm2 9520 is a clear improvement on its predecessor with a superior SurePress touch screen and WiFi being the main benefits. With BlackBerry's unrivalled email capabilities, plus good browser and 3.2 megapixel camera, plus an ever-increasing range of add-ons available from BlackBerry App World, it's definitely in the zone as an iPhone rival, but whether or not you go for it probably all depends on whether you love or loathe the idea of the clicking screen.