First an admission. I have never been a fan of BlackBerry devices. Maybe that's partly because management have never found me worthy of one, but it's mostly because they have always felt 'plasticky' to me. The Pearl was, of course, slimmer than the traditional BlackBerry brick but still lacked a certain physical gravitas, while the Bold just seemed unnecessarily bulky. So the Storm really is a revolution.
Basically the same size as the iPhone - though admittedly about the same weight as the heavier G1 - the Storm just feels more sturdy than many of its predecessors. That said, I never got to chuck it on the floor to see whether my perception of its resilience is warranted and it needs to be, because customers will be stuck with it for two years if they want to get it free from exclusive network partner Vodafone.
But it is the Storm's touchscreen that sets it apart from the rest of the recent button-less pack. It actually makes the iPhone look flat.
Both the G1 and the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic - which by the way will be sold in the UK by Orange - have made use of tactile feedback. The G1 uses it cleverly, for instance, when you move icons around the desktop. Press and hold on an icon and it shudders to tell you it can be moved about. The 5800, meanwhile, uses it well to make its touchscreen qwerty keypad seem much more active by having the virtual keys gently vibrate when pressed. RIM, however, has taken a different approach to the difference between navigating a page and activating a page.
RIM maintains that for years it has steered clear of touchscreens not because it could not make them, but because its core business customers feared that they would accidentally send an email or text or make a call just by moving around the screen.
The 5800 gets around this problem by demanding double tapping to activate commands. The Storm, however, has a touchscreen that effectively floats a fraction of a millimeter above a whole bank of sensors so when you scroll down to an icon you want you just press down on the screen in the right place. It gives the sort of physical click that any BlackBerry user will recognise from the trackball on previous devices. Its simple but remarkably effective.
The Storm has many of the features people have come to expect in the post-iPhone world. Turn it through 90 degrees and the screen flips from portrait to landscape. Web pages are crisp and clean and easily navigated by dragging them around. Double tap on an area and it zooms in. If you want to click on a link you can move a cursor around a screen with your finger - cleverly the cursor is set slightly away from your finger so you can see what you are doing, the same goes for the cursor when typing emails if you need to go back and make corrections - or if you have zoomed in, you can just 'click' on the link.
One Storm-specific variant is to place two fingers on the screen - one at the start of some text and one at the end - which highlights the text so it can be copied and pasted into an email, text message or instant message.
One potential surfing drawback is that the Storm does not have Wi-Fi - a technology of which Vodafone is no fan - but with HSDPA it should operate fine... provided the company can keep its network up to scratch.
The 3.2 megapixel camera is better than the camera in the iPhone - and it has a flash like the Nokia 5800 - while its video capture rate is even better than the Finnish effort. It comes with all the usual widgets such as purpose-built versions of YouTube, Flickr and Facebook and BlackBerry plans to make its software developer's kit available from today in the hope that application hounds will get working on creating some must-have apps.
BlackBerry is working on its own application store but Vodafone also plans to make them available through the device and give downloaders the chance to pay for them through their phone bill. Showing its business roots, the Storm already has software for reading and editing Word and Powerpoint documents.
The device's music player will play pretty much everything - except tracks purchased via iTunes, of course - as will its video player. And you get to plug your own headphones into it. Hopefully Vodafone will ship it with a fairly chunky SD card, at least bigger than the 2GB card which T-Mobile plans for the G1.
GPS enables a host of map applications - including of course BlackBerry maps and Google Maps - while it will work with instant messenger clients from AOL and Windows Live Messenger to GoogleTalk and ICQ.
Being a BlackBerry, of course, email is very important and it can integrate 10 different accounts into one inbox and take push email from all the major web accounts such as GMail, Hotmail etc. Obviously it will sync with Outlook, Exchange or Lotus Notes et al because it is, after all, a BlackBerry, which gives it a major advantage over the G1.
When it comes to integrating all the different ways that a user can communicate, however, it does lack a certain panache. Other devices - especially the iPhone, with visual voicemail, and the 5800, with its clever use of its contact books to store all your communications with individual people - do so-called integrated communications better than the Storm.
Oh and if you get completely lost it has those two friendly green and red buttons on the bottom. It is, after all, a phone...
On the surface the Storm runs the iPhone a close second of the four Christmas touchscreens, beating the Nokia 5800 - who can be bothered to double tap everything? - and the G1. But the devil is going to be in the detail.
One of the things that makes the iPhone so appealing is the unlimited data package that O2 put together for it. Vodafone is being evasive about exactly what is going to be included in the £35 a month contract - for 24 months remember - which will qualify for a free device.
Having integrated all your email accounts into one inbox and got ready to start editing everyone's attachments and uploading great video, the last thing you want to be doing is trying to work out how much data you have used each month so you can avoid a massive bill. A badly constructed tariff could kill this phone. But if done right, the Storm will ruffle a few feathers over in Cupertino.
