BlackBerry Storm:

BlackBerry Storms:

A storm is coming, the BlackBerry Storm, RIM's first touchscreen phone. It'll blow in first from Verizon in an CDMA EV-DO version this fall, although no one is saying exactly when or for how much. A Vodafone version of the Storm, officially the 9530, also makes landfall in Europe, which means there'll likely be a GSM HSDPA 3G Storm-front moving into for the U.S. at some point. I will now end the silly storm puns.

As you'd expect, since Storm is a full touchscreen device, there's no physical thumbpad. Instead, you get BlackBerry’s SureType two-characters-per-key QWERTY keypad (the one that's on the company's Pearl phones) when typing in portrait mode and a full QWERTY in landscape mode. Storm provides haptic feedback – RIM says the touch screen depresses slightly when pressed and releases with a light "click" – much like a physical keyboard. Like most iPhone clones, the Storm screen automatically re-orients itself when you rotate the phone.

Since this is RIM's answer to the iPhone, the Storm is equipped with all the digital all-work-and-no-play-makes-Jack-a-dull-boy toys you’d expect: a 3.25-inch 480 x 360 pixel screen, a full HTML Web browser, a 3.2 MP camera with variable zoom, auto focus, flash and video recording, GPS with support for location-based applications and photo geo-tagging, MP3/AAC/WMA music and MPEG-4/H.264-compatible video players, a 3.5 mm stereo headset jack, and stereo Bluetooth.

There's 1 GB of memory built in and a microSD card slot that can support up to 16 GB, but no WiFi.

And, of course, Storm is loaded with all the usual BlackBerry email and messaging goodies, along with the DataViz Documents to Go suite for reading and editing Microsoft Office documents. There have been reports that RIM will open its own iPhone-like application store, but there’s been no official announcement.