Research In Motion, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone are banking on it. They jointly announced today that the much-anticipated new BlackBerry Storm — the first BlackBerry without a physical keyboard — will be available to Verizon and Vodafone customers worldwide next month. No pricing details have emerged yet, but the companies expect it to be competitive with smartphone rivals.
I briefly got my hands on the large, high-resolution touch display device recently and came away impressed. The Storm’s touch-screen “clicks” when you gently press it, promising an experience that is somewhat like a BlackBerry with a physical keyboard. As with the iPhone, you can orient the screen in portrait or landscape position. But I’ll reserve judgment until I’ve had the opportunity to put it through its paces.
A few other details: In lieu of that physical keyboard, you can take advantage of a couple of virtual keyboards: qwerty (in landscape mode) or RIM’s so-called SureType layout (in portrait). There’s a 3.2-megapixel camera (compared to 2.0 on the iPhone) with flash. You can take calls while sending or responding to e-mail or browsing the HTML Web browser. It has GPS and — envious iPhone fans, take note — MMS picture messaging and cut-and-paste functionality. The built-in speaker sounded pretty good, too.
The 5.46-ounce Storm comes with an 8-gigabyte MicroSD card in addition to 1 GB of onboard memory.
It will work at reasonably fast speeds in lots of places The U.S. version is compatible with Verizon’s EV-DO Rev A/CDMA technology. But it works around the world on GSM and other networks.
By Ed Baig
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