The Blackberry Storm was officially announced yesterday in the US by Vodafone and Verizon Wireless which have joined forces for what they believe is going to be an iconic change in the world of smartphones, as well as for Blackberry. Up until recently, Blackberry’s design team has always leaned towards a more conservative and cautious design, but we saw a dramatic change with the recently released Blackberry Bold. The Bold has clearly taken into consideration that smartphones are more than just a business tool and with the growing popularity of the Blackberry, it was about time that they came out of the box.

A Bold Step with the Blackberry Storm

The Storm has only furthered the more creative approach taken by Blackberry by delving into the currently very competitive touchscreen market in which manufacturers are all vying for the crown of iPhone killer. Looking at the Storm, you can see that Blackberry has really thought long and hard about that fine balance between design and functionality and about how heavy leanings toward either one of these can be the disaster of any handset. And let’s be fair to a company which has only recently seen that phones can be pretty as well as practical, it has done a fantastic job with the Storm.

The first thing you will notice on the Storm is the stunning UI. The brilliant high res screen does wonders at accentuating the suave looking icons as well as flattering the applications packed inside. The glass touchscreen gives feedback when pressed to let you know that you have performed an action, you can thus avoid the frustration created by other touch screen handsets with even a slightly sluggish OS.

Features of the Blackberry Storm

Lets have a look at some of the hardware features packed into this little beaut:

• 3.25″ Touchscreen (480 x 360)
• Accelorometer
• Visual Qwerty keyboard
• 3.2 Megapixel Camera
• Integrated GPS with A-GPS functionality
• 1GB Onboard memory with MicroSD support
• 624 MHz Processor
• 3G
• EDGE
• Built in Handsfree
• Bluetooth
• 3.5mm Stereo Headphone Jack
• Mini-Usb connectivity

To complement the great hardware specs the Storm has a plethora of fantastic applications in its repertoire that are certain to please left- and right-brainers alike, and the Blackberry OS seamlessly joins these all together. Included in the applications toybox are:

• BlackBerry^® Internet Service, BlackBerry^® Unite!, BlackBerry^® Professional Software and BlackBerry^® Enterprise Server support
• a Media Player which supports many audio and video formats. It can be used to play slideshows and create playlists and even has 11 equalizer preset filters.
• Blackberry Maps
• DataViz Documents on the Go which allows you to view and edit Word, Excel and Powerpoitn documents directly on the handset.
• Ambient light sensor that adjusts the backlighting according to the surrounding light.
• Organiser
• Calculator

By some magical trick of the eye, the pictures make the Storm look like it would be too big to even fit into your pocket but in reality the Storm is only a smidgen bigger than the 30GB iPod video. Even for someone like me, who has childs hands, the Storm is really comfortable to hold and easy to use. We have heard a whisper that the Storm will be available to the UK public in the last days of October so keep those eyes peeled.

If you’d like to have a go at the Storm before you make up you mind if you love it or hate it, try out the Blackberry Storm Simulator. Select v4.7.0 from the drop-down menu and after you’ve filled out a quick form and verified its accuracy you can download the 65MB zipped file.