Verizon BlackBerry Storm launch day!

So the day that BlackBerry (NSDQ: RIMM) fans and touchscreen smartphone enthusiasts have been looking forward to for months has finally arrived. As of the start of business today, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) started selling the highly anticipated BlackBerry Storm 9350 to eager customers. The BlackBerry 9350 Storm represents the first-ever touchscreen BlackBerry and features an innovative, industry-first touchscreen technology, dubbed “SurePress.” The SurePress system essentially turns the BlackBerry Storm’s touchscreen into one giant mouse button.

Rather than relying on pseudo-haptic feedback mechanisms that do little more than vibrate the entire device with every key-press, the BlackBerry Storm uses a capacitance touchscreen (like the iPhone 3G) to detect finger position. Placing a finger lightly on the Storm’s touchscreen highlights the target key, a more forceful finger-press cause the entire touchscreen panel to “click” downwards. It takes a bit of getting used to (especially for iPhone owners used to typing with light taps of the touchscreen), but SurePress makes for a great compromise between no-feedback and pseudo-haptic feedback.

In the spirit of the industry’s first touchscreen BlackBerry launch, we’ve gathered some in-store footage of the Verizon BlackBerry Storm for you to enjoy. We noted that the BlackBerry Storm OS was a bit laggy, but a store representative assured us that the lag-issues were due to customers not exiting out of applications. The still-open applications were causing the Storm’s browser to and the screen-rotations to bog down a bit.