Outside of the iPhone and the G1, very few phones fuel the forum flamewars like the BlackBerry Storm. As the first touchscreen BlackBerry, it was bound to have some haters. Whether you’ve been enamored since day one or a zealous skeptic since the beginning, the phone has one fault that is undeniably unfortunate: no WiFi.
There’s nothing that can be done on the WiFi front for the original Storm – but what about take two?
As with any phone that sells reasonably well, rumors of a follow-up are already abound; According to SlashGear, RIM is already busy crackin’ away at the BlackBerry Storm 2, complete with WiFi. That all sounds perfectly reasonable (hell, we could have assumed as much) – but the release window seems a bit crazy: according to their source, they’re aiming at September of this year.
The Storm was released in November 2008. If the Storm 2 were to hit the shelves this September, that’s roughly 10 months between the original product and the followup. Sure, it’s possible (phones generally take a year and a half to go from concept to consumer, but they could have been working on Storm 2 for months prior to the original Storm’s release) – but even Apple, king of planned obsolescence, puts a full year of padding between their handset releases. Does RIM really have the gall to outdate one of their biggest ventures before it even hits its first birthday?