The BlackBerry Storm offers a surprising amount of innovation and usability for a touchscreen business phone. The buttons are larger, the menus fonts are sized for fingers and not trackballs, and there seems to be a bit more visual flourish, as if the flashing icons will entice fingertips even better.

The phone itself feels good in the hand, but upon close inspection it seems like a hodge podge of executive styles. On the front, there is a chrome bumper and glossy piano black accents; around back there is a soft-touch paint finish on the top and bottom, and the battery cover is a brushed-metal gunmetal grey. It's a nice looking phone, but RIM probably could have focused on any one of these styles and still come out ahead.

The BlackBerry Storm also has an interesting quirk to the keyboard. If your right hand tries to cross the aisle and type on the left-hand part of the screen, the keyboard becomes much less accurate. Probably having to do with the way fingers are angled as they press the screen, the BlackBerry Storm's full-QWERTY layout is made for two-handed, my-side / your-side typing, and it just doesn't work any other way.

A quartet of familiar BlackBerry hardware buttons sit below the 4.4-inch display. They are, from left to right, a Send button (marked with a green phone icon), which brings up the phone menu and initiates calls or dispatches messages; a Menu button (with a BlackBerry icon) to bring up contextual menus; an Escape button (with a return arrow) to close menus or go back to the previous screen; and an End/Power button (with a red phone icon) for ending calls, returning to the home screen, or turning the handset on or off. The phone lock and mute controls on the upper left and right corners, respectively, though not discrete buttons, are clickable under the casing.

The BlackBerry Storm uses a screen that is the same resolution as the display on the Apple iPhone, and the BlackBerry Bold, for that matter. At 480 by 360 pixels, the BlackBerry Storm's screen looks great, and we were very happy with its video performance. The camera on the BlackBerry Storm should have been much better. After all, with auto focus, a 3.2-megapixel sensor and plenty of advanced settings for shooter, you might expect the camera will take decent photos, worth uploading or maybe printing.

The BlackBerry Storm comes with both BlackBerry Maps and VZ Navigator. Hardware features on either side repeat those found on other recent BlackBerrys. These include volume controls on the upper right; a button for activating the 3.2-megapixel camera and capturing snapshots on the center right; a voice recording button on the upper left, and a mini-USB charging/syncing port on the lower left. Above the volume controls is a port for a standard 3.5mm headset. The Storm's accelerometer lets you use it in landscape or portrait mode for most applications. .

BlackBerry Storm 9530 Quick Facts:

• It is Research in Motion's first touchscreen smartphone.
• "Click" touchscreen, making it easy to input text precisely.
• The resolution is the highest ever produced by RIM.
• 3.2 megapixel camera.
• Global device with quad band architecture, good in 195 countries.
• Full HTML web browsing, visual voicemail.

Promotional Video of Blackberry 9530 Storm: