Oh dear. This is the part of a negative review where I say how much I usually like a company’s products before taking apart its latest creation. So prepare yourself.

I love BlackBerrys. I own one. I adore it. I spend too much time with it.

But that’s exactly why I’m so disappointed – no, I’m appalled – with RIM’s latest offering, the Blackberry Storm. Using it for the past few days, left me with feeling like how I do about Robert De Niro movies these days. Why are you tarnishing your legacy with this shoddy offering?

You see, for every good feature with the Storm, there’s an aching, glaring, gigantic flaw that makes you want to bash open your head with it. Where to begin?

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Oh yes, the Storm can’t connect to wi-fi. Anyone with any experience of a smartphone, like the iPhone, knows that they are great because they can connect to the internet using a 3G connection, wherever you are. This 3G connection, however, is not “superfast” - a claim that has got Apple into trouble recently when advertising its iPhone. Your broadband connection at home is far faster, so you want to be able to connect to your home wireless to allow the phone to run to its full capabilities. The Storm can’t do this. It is a critical problem from which the phone cannot recover.

But there are more problems beside. The software on the phone is a nightmare. It is slow and glitchy. Sometimes you can quickly move between playing music and then switching to surfing the internet on a browser. More often though, you would have to wait as the screen freezes for a few seconds before working again. This is incredibly frustrating.

Granted, this software problem may have been just a problem with the review copy I was sent. But it is a complaint that has been echoed by many other first-time users since. The Storm feels like it has been rushed out to market. The cynic in me notices that Christmas is around the corner.

The hardware itself is quite nice. Its key feature is the clickable touchscreen, which for the most part, is something I like a lot. Instead of tapping on a pane of glass, you press down on the screen, so it is far closer to typing on a physical keyboard.

Closer yes, but not close enough. Typing at keyboard speed is still impossible. This is because the screen is essentially one big button that can only be pressed down once at a time, unlike tapping various different keys on a physical Qwerty board. The clickable screen is an improvement on the iPhone, but not as significant an advance as it first seemed. If you want something to bash out a sizeable report at short notice, the old Blackberry remains the phone of choice.

There is something clearly wrong with the battery as well. After charging the phone overnight it was so hot that I could barely hold it. One of my favourite things about my old BlackBerry is how little charging it required. I can still go about five days before my old Blackberry requires juicing up again.

The Storm, however, eats up battery life in a way I haven’t seen in a phone in years. For example, I left it in a bag unused but not turned on for a day and half. The phone was dead when I tried to play with it after that.

These are all critical problems for the Storm because it was never going to compete with the iPhone on one key area: applications.

The App Store has made the iPhone much more than a flashy device, because developers have independently created thousands of new features for the phone - everything from GPS navigation systems to a virtual lightsabre.

The innovative applications are part of the reason why Google’s Android system, which runs on the new T-Mobile G1 is “open source” – allowing developers to edit and change the software as they see fit. To compete with Apple, Google needs others to come up with clever add-ons to keep the Android system fresh. RIM’s application list is extremely short in comparison with Apple and Google.

There are many things I like about the Storm, though. The design is clean and stylish – even though some friends thought it looked and felt a bit fat and heavy. The speaker is loud and surprisingly clear for a phone. The video quality is excellent. Downloading music straight onto the phone from is surprisingly quick and easy. Calls could be heard loud and clear. There were no reception issues from where I live in London.

But the Storm is a missed opportunity. If only RIM had got the basics right – if only they had solved the software issues – this phone could have been an iPhone killer. But the Storm isn’t close.

I dearly hope they fix it for a new version. In the meantime, I admit, my head was briefly turned by the flashy newcomer that offered everything and more. But it was all too much, too soon. So I’m heading back to using my ugly but efficient BlackBerry Curve instead.

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