I was talking to another BlackBerry Storm user in the airport and he was telling me that the Storm annoyed him for a couple minor reasons. The first issue he stated was how the keyboard would only let you type one number before switching back to the alphabetical keyboard. Having a Storm and having faced this problem before, I quickly explained that he could use the number lock feature. The process could not be easier or more obvious. Press and hold the number key and they keyboard will switch to numeric with a padlock showing ‘number lock’ is enabled.
His next issue was that of accidentally pressing the voice dialing and the camera buttons. I had the same issue with the Storm in the past and actually wrote a post on RIMarkable about the issue. Regardless, I walked him through the solution. Options | Screen/Keyboard then change Right Side Convenience Key Opens and/or Left Side Convenience Opens. To avoid issues I changed these settings to do nothing. I accidentally press these buttons when I remove the phone from my pocket all the time and now I am protected from accidentally starting something I don’t want.
The final issue was more complex and it had to do with needing to hard reboot the phone after it becomes unresponsive or slow. For that, I told him about Meterberry. I explained how you can use MeterBerry to reboot your phone daily at a specific time (my reboot time is 4AM). Additionally, I have also have MeterBerry try to free up memory on my phone hourly when the phone is idle. The combination of these two options keeps my BlackBerry Storm running well.
Since we ran out of time and had to part ways, I did not get to explain to him about how Shrink-OS can help give you more available memory right from the start. We just exchanged BlackBerry PIN’s and so I will send him the article tomorrow. It is rather funny that in 1 year of using my Storm I only did PIN-to-PIN with 3 or 4 people, and now in one week I have exchanged PINs with 6 different people. Go figure.