Hands-on with the RIM BlackBerry Storm

Typical – you wait months for one long-anticipated smartphone, and then two turn up at once. We’ve just seen the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1 and now here’s the RIM BlackBerry Storm.

After all the speculation about what form RIM’s answer to the iPhone might take, it’s good to actually see the Storm in the flesh – or at least plastic and brushed aluminium. The good news is that despite dropping the keyboard in favour of a huge capacitive touch-screen, the Storm works as well as any other BlackBerry smartphone – as our hands-on video shows.

Sadly, there some bad news too and although the Storm gets a lot of things right, it gets a surprising few things wrong, too. First, there’s no Wi-Fi – an unbelievable omission on a smartphone these days. It also only has single-band HSDPA, which is a bit of a limitation if you travel overseas a lot. These silly shortcomings aren’t necessarily deal-breakers, though – as you’ll see from our video.