** Update:

Finally! Here it is CrackBerry Nation, my first hands-on impressions of the BlackBerry Storm. Unlike my BlackBerry 9000, KickStart and Javelin pre-release reviews, this won’t be the first one of the BlackBerry Storm up on the net, so I’ll do my best to make up for the tardiness by at least making it the best. Though it is articles like this where I wish I was an actual journalist and not a BlackBerry Addict turned wannabe-blogger… no making fun of the number of times you see the words Sweet and Awesome in the paragraphs ahead!

Regular readers of CrackBerry.com will know I’ve been dying to get my hands on the BlackBerry Storm for months now. Earlier this week it finally happened while in Santa Clara, California, at the BlackBerry Developer Conference. Research in Motion didn’t have an official BlackBerry Storm exhibit setup, but both the 9530 and 9500 could be found in limited quantity within the exhibition pavilion at a few booths, including Verizon’s of course, and occasionally could be spotted in the hands of individuals roaming the halls within the hotel conference area. The pavilion booths were constantly packed with people who appeared to be as excited about the Storm as I was, and the people I tried to corner in the wild dashed on me as soon as they glanced my name badge (for some silly reason I think they had the impression I’d try and roshambo them and take their device when they were down for the count) so though the Storm was present at DevCon, getting real quality time with it wasn’t as easy as one might have hoped. Luckily and thankfully, I managed to do just that and on Day 1 of DevCon spent an hour of QT with the Storm (I will never forget my first time!). An hour flew by in the blink of an eye press of a touchscreen, and though no photos or videos were allowed at that first encounter, by the time I boarded the plane for the flight home two days later I had managed to steal away a few more precious minutes with the Storm and all said and done have quite a bit to go off of to bring you this review, though more time would have allowed me to dig deeper into the details.

* Disclaimer: As with our other pre-release reviews, please keep in mind that all of the BlackBerry Storms I used at DevCon (featured in images/videos in this review) and have based my initial impressions on are pre-release hardware devices that were running beta software. *

Since I know many of you have been waiting as long a time to read this review as I have been waiting to write it, I’ll make no effort to keep it concise and short. And where I’m lacking images or info I’ll borrow from some of the other excellent content that has already surfaced on the web. You can visit our BlackBerry Storm Super Page to access all of that.