The Blackberry Storm is seen in this handout image courtesy of Verizon Wireless
© AFP/HO

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The phone, the Blackberry Storm, will be available later this year through Verizon Wireless in the United States and Vodafone in Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand, the Canadian company said.

The Storm resembles the iPhone but its color touch-screen differs in that it is "clickable" -- the screen depresses slightly when touched like a typewriter key.

RIM president Mike Lazaridis described the touch-screen as a "truly tactile touch interface" which "solves the longstanding problem associated with typing on traditional touch-screens."

Users navigate on the touch-screen by using their finger like a cursor, scrolling, highlighting, panning and zooming and clicking on selections.

Other features of the Storm include wireless email through high-speed 3G mobile broadband networks, an HTML Web browser which allows audio and video streaming and SMS, MMS and IM messaging.

It also features a media player, a 3.2-megapixel camera, a video camera and Global Positioning System (GPS) capability alongside Blackberry Maps.

RIM did not provide a price for the phone or a release date except to say it would be in stores by the Christmas holiday season.

The Storm is seen by many industry analysts as RIM's response to the iPhone and an attempt to increase the popularity of the Blackberry beyond businessmen addicted to its email capabilities.

"This is going to draw lot of comparisons with the Apple iPhone obviously because it's 'touch' and it's cool and it's sleek and it's sexy and it's beautiful," said Ramon Llamas, an analyst at market intelligence firm IDC.

"But it's not just a defensive posture," he said. "I think it's a natural evolution of things -- touch-screen is a thing everybody's very hot on right now."

The Blackberry is the dominant smartphone in the United States, with a market share of around 50 percent, but is facing increasing competition from the iPhone and others.

The release of the Storm comes some two weeks after Internet giant Google entered the mobile phone market with a touch-screen smartphone developed with T-Mobile, the T-Mobile G1, which runs on Google open-source software.

According to the IDC's Llamas, the number of smartphone users in the United States remains small compared to the number of regular cellphone users, just 10-12 percent of the total 260-270 million subscribers.

©AFP