BlackBerry Storm Review

The idea was that a touchscreen should feel like a key, so the whole 3.25 inch panel of the Storm sat on a switch and clicked down when you pressed it. You selected by touching and confirmed by pushing, which meant every letter of every email was a physical click, with the screen springing back before the next one. Typing was slower than on a Curve and slower than on an iPhone, and that was before the software.

BlackBerry OS 4.7 shipped unfinished: the accelerometer took seconds to rotate the screen, the browser hung, the phone froze and rebooted, and the 528 MHz Qualcomm MSM7600 with 128 MB of RAM never felt like it was on your side. There was no Wi-Fi at all, on a phone whose browser needed it most. Verizon launched it on November 21, 2008 at 199.99 dollars after a mail-in rebate on a two-year contract, and sold a million in two months on the strength of the BlackBerry name and the iPhone's AT&T exclusivity.

Losing the Signal, the history of RIM, reports that almost all of that first million came back for replacement, some more than once, and that Verizon wanted RIM to pay for it. Mike Lazaridis later admitted the phone had been rushed. The 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera and the bright 480 by 360 panel were genuinely good, and OS 5.0 a year later made the Storm tolerable, but by then the Storm2, with Wi-Fi, had replaced it. It is remembered as the phone that showed RIM could not do touch, and the memory is fair.