BlackBerry's Storm, and the Continued Quest for the Perfect Phone

The iPhone is not perfect. There is, of course, a tendency to genuflect before it, as if God delivered it unto us. The thing crashes. It drops calls. Its App Store is an autocracy. The touch screen isn't for everybody. It doesn't shoot video. The iPhone is a wonderful, thrilling breakthrough. But perfect it's not.

So the other cell phone makers are taking a whack at it. Maybe they can make something a little more perfect, and send Apple back to the drawing board.The latest to try is Research In Motion, which makes the BlackBerry and tomorrow will start selling its Storm phone on the Verizon Wireless network.

From the flood of reviews so far, it's obvious that the storm ain't perfect either. It advances the state of the art a little bit in some ways, and it seems like a decent choice for people who don't want to type on a touch screen or don't want AT&T's network, which is all you can get with the iPhone. But the overall experience falls a little short of the iPhone's.

So the perfect post-iPhone phone eludes us. A bunch of companies will try making Android phones that do the trick. Nokia in the next year will unleash a bunch of smart phones. Sooner or later, a competitor will make the iPhone sweat a little -- unless Apple's next act is even better than the current one.
 
. □