Blackberry Storm Updates

As we predicted earlier, lines were surprisingly long outside of Verizon stores with die hard Blackberry fans waiting to get their mittens on a new Blackberry Storm. The “Storm” is now being touted as being a potential “Iphone Killer”, due to the massive number of Blackberry/RIM addicts out there. The G1 phone from Google was also expected to make a play for a nice market share, but both devices are too new to see what’s going to happen.

Reuters reports that hundreds of people were lined up outside of a Verizon store in Manhattan for the launch, and when they sold out of the units, angry Blackberry nerds started getting unruly, so much so that NYPD were called in to quiet the crackberry geeks down:

“More than 200 people had waited at a Verizon store in mid-town Manhattan early in the morning, many of whom were turned away after it ran out of the new phones less than an hour after opening at 8 a.m. The angry customers caused a ruckus and police came to restore order.”

Unruly fans do have the option of ordering the phone from the Verizon website, but they’ll have to wait at least 5-7 days for it, but don’t count on it (like the faithful Google G1 fans who waited weeks when they were told the same thing). Verizon promises that there are enough units to go around, and that a little patience can go a long way:

“Verizon said hundreds of others were in lines outside its stores up and down the U.S. east coast, but added that it had “plenty of phones” and would keep getting more shipments. It declined to give specifics on inventory levels.”

Bottom line – if you want a Blackberry Storm, the safest bet is to probably order one online sooner than later. Yeah, you might find one in smaller towns outside of the city, but I wouldn’t count on it. Blackberry fans are EVERYwhere, and you can bet that with the cheap price ($199) everyone is going to want to grab one up.

(Image partly from ZDNet Blogs)