RIM finally formally announced the BlackBerry Storm, its first touchscreen device.
Designed to satisfy the needs of both consumers and business customers, the BlackBerry Storm smartphone combines the powerful communications features, global connectivity and personal productivity advantages of the BlackBerry platform with a revolutionary touch-screen technology that dramatically enhances the touch interface and enables easy and precise typing. The world’s first “clickable” touch-screen responds much like a physical keyboard and also supports single-touch, multi-touch and gestures for intuitive and efficient application navigation.
The BlackBerry Storm’s touchscreen display will actually depress a tiny amount when the screen is pressed to give the user the same feeling as when they click on a physical button or key. It also supports multi-touches, taps, slides and other touch-screen gestures.
The BlackBerry Storm will come with a 3.25-inch touchscreen HVGA display (480 by 360 resolution with 184ppi) with ambient light sensor and accelerometer, 1GB of onboard memory and 128 MB of Flash memory, built-in GPS, Bluetooth 2.0 (with A2DP), a 3.2MP camera with autofocus and flash, a microSDHC card slot, a 3.5mm headphone jack and a 1400mAh battery. The U.S. model, the 9530, will come quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE, single-band (2100MHz) UMTS/HSPA and EV-DO Rev. A connectivity. The 9500 will come with quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and single-band (2100MHz) UMTS/HSPA connectivity.
The BlackBerry Storm will be available later this fall, exclusively to Verizon Wireless customers in the U.S. and Vodafone customers in Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand. Pricing was not announced.