The BlackBerry Storm is a world phone: It runs on Verizon's EV-DO Rev A network here in the U.S. and on dual-band CDMA, quad-band EDGE, and 2,100-MHz HSDPA networks abroad. Using the phone as a USB modem for a Windows Vista PC, we got speeds of 600 to 900 kilobits per second down and 350 to 500 Kbps up. In Europe, the handset hits HSDPA 7.2 networks with HSUPA, which makes the networks even faster.The Storm doesn't have Wi-Fi, but that doesn't concern us too much; you must buy this phone with a Verizon data plan, and Verizon's 3G coverage in the U.S. is excellent.

A solid voice phone, the Storm has fine reception, and earpiece and speakerphone volume are both very loud. There's also some pleasing in-ear feedback of your own voice. Transmissions sounded steady on the other end, with just a little background noise coming through, thanks to the phone's dual-mic noise cancellation. The Storm uses Nuance's speaker-independent voice dialing, which worked well. Visual voice mail is also on board, and it worked perfectly.

In a straight-up talk time test, we got an excellent 7 hours 25 minutes. RIM says it expects the device to last through a full day of heavy use on one charge. That's a lot shorter than the Curve, but on a par with the BlackBerry Bold. In a video playback test, the Storm got 4 hours, 32 minutes of solid video battery life, which isn't bad for a phone.

I tested the Storm with the mono Plantronics Voyager 520 headset. Bluetooth call quality was great. The Storm runs a new version of the BlackBerry OS, version 4.7, to support the touch features. It features all of the typical BlackBerry applications, including e-mail, the music player, the contacts book, and the Web browser, but with touch interfaces. OS 4.7 also has all of the new features found on the BlackBerry Bold's OS 4.6, including built-in Microsoft Office document editing and support for HTML e-mail.

You get support for up to ten e-mail accounts, with a new, more simplified setup interface than what you'll see on other BlackBerrys. You can cut and paste text, selecting multiple messages or multiple lines of text using multitouch. Oddly, that's the only use of multitouch on the device. The Storm also comes with links to download free instant-messaging clients for AIM, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo, along with the popular BlackBerry Facebook app.

With a big, beautiful screen, the Storm promises a great media experience. It delivers on the device side There are four ways to sync music and video between the Storm and a PC: Rhapsody; an iTunes conduit for unprotected music playlists; and dragging and dropping in Windows Explorer all worked fine on my tests. But the last option—RIM's flagship Roxio application, which also reformats music and video for the Storm's screen—was best. Syncing contacts and calendars with Microsoft Outlook 2007 worked well. The device has plenty of room for music: 879MB of on-board storage and an 8GB microSD card included (the phone accepts cards up to 16GB). The card slot is located under the back cover, but not under the battery. Once your music and video is on the Storm, it looks and sounds great. The music player handles unprotected MP3, WMA, and AAC files and shows album art. iPhone-formatted MP4 video files played beautifully; a QVGA-size WMV file was clear. The phone syncs playlist data from Rhapsody or iTunes. Verizon says it will soon have a client for its V Cast video streaming service for the Storm; Verizon will push that app to subscribers over the air free.

The browser is a slight upgrade from the BlackBerry Bold's. It's still slow at loading pages with JavaScript, but it doesn't stall out completely like the Bold's did. You zoom in on pages by double-tapping and click on links by clicking. The Storm streamed video from YouTube's mobile site smoothly. If you don't like the built-in browser, Opera Mini works well.

Two GPS applications are on board, Verizon's VZNavigator, (which gives you spoken, turn-by-turn driving directions) and the free BlackBerry Maps (which doesn't). The camera app is also GPS-enabled, so you can geotag your photos. I found the GPS to be unusually good at swiftly locking onto satellite signals. When it can't get a signal at all, the system resorts to a rough estimate based on cell-tower locations. The GPS is "unlocked," meaning that third-party programs on the phone can use it to find locations. But apps have to be written specifically for the Storm—the generic version of Google Maps for BlackBerry, for instance, couldn't get a GPS fix.

The 3.2-megapixel camera features an LED flash and video recording. In full daylight, pictures looked very sharp, though colors were a bit pale. Indoors, though, photos had a serious blur problem because of slow shutter speeds. Turning on the image stabilization feature helped but made the photo appear to take longer to capture. It turned out, though, that the screen just stays black longer; the stabilizer raised the 1.2-second shutter delay to only 1.4 seconds. Videos were smooth and uncompressed-looking at 320 by 240 at 24 frames per second. However, the phone shot out an error when trying to save one of my test videos.