It's nice to see an article with some reasonable commentary on the "issues" with the Storm. Having played with the iPhone and now the Storm, not only do I find Pogue's review offensive, I find it borderline slander.
Someone with his level of influence on the tech community should be more responsible for his commentary.
To be honest, I'm fed up with all the iPhone vs BB comparisons. I remember when the iPhone came out and they were calling it the BB killer, like there is really any serious comparison between the two. Sure they have similar functions and uses, but the iPhone is a really sweet phone for the masses, and the BB is a really serious tool for the corporate world. Sure there is and will be cross-over of the two, and RIM would be foolish not to try and build some devices to cater to the public, but that doesn't mean the two should be compared to each other as they have been.

I think the biggest thing that annoys me in many of the reviews is the annoyance with the double action touch screen. Personally I find the RIM solution to avoiding accidental "screen taps" to be brilliant, it works excellent, sure it may take some getting used to for some, but I would be great if these reviewers would spend a week or so using it, instead of 10 mins and then blasting it.

Cheers,

I just switched back to my old faithful BlackBerry today after 3 anxiety-filled days in which I could not reply to a single e-mail without 3 attempts at every single word. (This does not count the accidental tilt of the screen or the slip of my hand to accidentally start the video camera). Happily and enthusiastically restarted the old one, and happily packed up the box to go back to Verizon.

If you want to type sentences (more than Yup or Nope), this multi-function hand muncher is more than annoying. Some fast thumb typists are going to throw the thing into a beer mug, I am sure. And I got no disagreement from Verizon tech support when I said why I was returning it.

Course, if you want to use it as a video camera, a music down-loader, a web surfer (maybe, if you can bookmark all your links), or maybe even a phone -- sound is good -- or anything other than typing, more Storm power to you.

By the way, if anyone remembers the old banner years ago which was such an embarrassing lack of integration between web and store in CompUSA: "We're not compusa.com" -- so don't expect to buy on the web and return in the store, then welcome to Verizon. The store informed me that there would be a $35 restocking charge for bringing it back there versus sending it in its box back to corporate.

Hope the dogged enthusiastics continue to enjoy the Storm.

I'm looking for product reviews, not body slams. Why not just tell us about the product and go cry in the closet by yourself. This is the kind of thing that fills the Internet with crap. Stop it.

The main problem with the BlackBerry Storm is that it's not much more than a big screen BlackBerry.

It does not ship with any innovative software or do much other than rotate automatically when turned.

Anyone looking to verify this should load up Facebook on the BlackBerry. Notice that it's the same tired application that's on all other BlackBerries. Notice that all the app really does is provide notifcations. To do anything really interesting you must launch the mobile Facebook site.

Compare that to the version available to iPhone which is damn close to a mobile version of Facebook complete with an easy way to upload photos and CHAT with your friends.

PS - The whole "reviewer is an APPLE FANBOY" is so 2000. I automatically skimmed any of your paragraphs that started with that. I assure you the NY Times is not publishing biased reviews. What I will also say is all the blog sites that had mediocre reviewes (neither praising or critical) suddenly turned very critical once they saw everyone else do it. If you have seen the Twitter feeds of the top 5 technology blogs you'd have seen MEGA complaints as they were writing reviews about stability, usability, etc. The real story here is not Pogue -- the real story is why so called top 5 gadget sites had such middle of the road reviews and only turned negative after comparing notes with each other. For grins go look through some of the twitter streams of those guys who wrote reviews and see what they had to say up to the embargo date. I think you'll be very surprised.