BlackBerry Storm Hands-On First Impressions!
A Pre-Release Look at RIM's First Touchscreen Smartphone — Finally! Here it is CrackBerry Nation, my first hands-on impressions of the BlackBerry Storm. Unlike my BlackBerry 9000, KickStart and Javelin pre-release reviews …
Context & Ripple Effects
October 2008 has been a steady drip of Storm leaks and previews: Boy Genius Report published a full spec-and-features rundown of the Storm 9500 and 9530 on October 5, Engadget followed with its own hands-on of the 9500 on October 8, and CrackBerry itself just revealed the BlackBerry Application Center. This post is CrackBerry Nation's own first tactile encounter with the device — notable because it's RIM's first touchscreen smartphone, a category the keyboard-first company had famously resisted.
First-order effects
- The enthusiast community gets its first detailed pre-release impressions of the Storm from a trusted BlackBerry-focused outlet, shaping expectations ahead of launch alongside the earlier Engadget and BGR previews.
- RIM's touchscreen debut moves from rumor to reviewed reality — the Storm is now being judged directly against the iPhone-era touchscreen standard rather than against prior BlackBerry hardware like the Javelin or KickStart.
Second-order effects
- Carrier and retail positioning for the Storm will hinge on how these early impressions land; a lukewarm reception pressures RIM to refine the device or lean harder on software differentiators like the Application Center storefront.
- Competing reviewers and leak sites are forced into an arms race of pre-release coverage, raising the stakes for exclusives around follow-up hardware such as the 9630.
Third-order effects
- If the Storm underwhelms, RIM faces a structural identity question: whether touch becomes a parallel line beside the keyboard franchise or a replacement — a tension that later coverage of a possible Storm3 slider keeps alive.
- A first touchscreen effort that stumbles would foreshadow the platform-level struggles later visible in the PlayBook review era, where RIM's response to post-keyboard computing repeatedly lagged the market.
The trend: This hands-on is one data point in the larger arc of RIM's reluctant pivot from its keyboard-centric identity into the touchscreen, app-store-driven smartphone market that Apple redefined.