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RIM has unveiled its first touchscreen, BlackBerry Storm, and is trying to gain visibility amid the hailstorm of excitement surrounding Android G1, iPhone 3G, Tube, LG Renoir and Dare, and so on. It has exclusives with Vodafone in Europe and Verizon Wireless in the US, and is offering a dual-mode HSPA/CDMA device that supports international roaming across those two carriers' usually incompatible networks.

The product will be in stores in November, in time for the key holiday purchasing period, and Verizon Wireless has been pre-marketing Storm heavily, highlighting RIM's role as the main alternative to the iPhone for CDMA carriers. In Europe, where the HSPA networks have a wealth of handsets with similar or better features than the Apple model, the market will be far tougher, but RIM has been making strong progress among non-north American cellcos, and we would expect its integrated apps strategy and the sleek design of Storm to make some impact on the smartphone race, especially now it has scored the hit of a Vodafone exclusive.

RIM has not announced pricing yet but the new device is likely to be in the $150-$200 range in the US, with 18-month or 24-month contract, putting it up against G1 and Instinct, and rather below the 'superphones' like Bold. In Europe, there should be more opportunities to get a Storm for free, given the intense competition for customers' mobile data contracts.

Storm has a 3.25-inch screen, just smaller than the iPhone's 3.5 inches, and is designed to be more rugged, which adds about 16% to its weight compared to the Apple rival. Other potential negatives are lack of Wi-Fi - which RIM says is an unnecessary drain on battery life, and less in demand now that 3G offers wide coverage and flat rates. There is no physical keyboard though the software can emulate a qwerty keyboard or cellphone keypad. Among its positive differentiators is a unique ClickThrough feature, which makes users push down on the screen to select an item, avoiding a key difficulty of touchscreens, the ease of accidentally picking the wrong items with a finger swipe.

True to its heritage, RIM does seem to have conquered the major challenge for touchscreens, their inadequacy for heavy email or texting users - even without a physical keyboard like Omnia has. The Storm is the first BlackBerry to showcase the new operating system, release 4.7, which offers a long overdue update to the user interface.

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