I recently joined the 21st century and bought a BlackBerry. It’s the new BlackBerry Storm too. My old phone finally died after a few years of solid abuse. I ended up buying the Storm at Best Buy on the release date since the local Verizon store was sold out. I’d like to thank Gordon in the Mountain View/Palo Alto area for not getting to Best Buy in time. I bought yours. In all honesty, I wanted an iPhone but I can’t stand AT&T. I’ve also been a Verizon customer since GTE Mobile. After playing with it for a few weeks here are some of my thoughts.

The accelerometer tends to get stuck and fails to recognize whether the phone is in the vertical or horizontal orientation. This makes answering the phone very difficult. To answer the phone you have to select the “answer” button that appears on the screen while it’s ringing. I kept losing calls waiting for the phone to recognize its orientation so I could press the button. Research in Motion released a patch last week which fortunately fixed the accelerometer issue. The phone is usable now. I was pretty disappointed for a while.

VZ Navigator is way cool. I don’t know how I survived before without it. I was on travel last week to King’s Bay, Georgia and used it for directions to and from the hotel. The phone was able to find a steak house and a Starbucks within a few miles of the hotel. I had never been to the area before so the GPS capability was very helpful. I also used it again to find a friend’s house in Fremont.

E-mail and web are working just fine. I have access to my non-work e-mail and the web browser actually looks like a web browser. I dig the keypad for typing. The full QWERTY keyboard works nicely. I’d never used a BlackBerry before so I can’t compare it to the button style devices but I can definately say I like it better than the iPhone. I’m always missing buttons on an iPhone. I’m told with practice I’d get used to it. I didn't need practice with the Storm. I was typing quickly on day one.

I haven’t really played with the camera so I can’t comment on it. iTunes is synched using the BlackBerry Digital Synch tool and I was able to copy a DVD onto the phone which looks great. Fortunately the phone uses standard phone jacks so I don’t have to use the weird ones my Krazer used. All in all I like the phone and can definitely see why they call it a crack berry. It was $199.99 with a two year contract. My contract had been up for a while and I just renewed it. I have no idea what my monthly bill will be since I was signing up with everything. I’ll find out in a few weeks.