Today’s the day when the BlackBerry Storm, Research in Motion’s apparent “answer” to the iPhone, was splashed all over the Internet. The old guard has chimed in, and it seems Research in Motion has a winner on its hands. Now it’s up to RIM to convince you to want one. Hard to tell if that’s gonna happen.

The BlackBerry Storm is RIM’s long-awaited touchscreen phone, and in today’s parlance, any phone with a touchscreen is automatically an iPhone killer or iPhone wannabe. The phone’s release date has changed and changed for months now, but it should, we think, be available before the holidays, probably in November. In the U.S., it’ll make its debut on Verizon Wireless, where it may be exclusively.

The Storm handles its touchscreen different than the way the iPhone does. Rather than be a la-di-da experience, where [iPhone] users can glide their finger across the screen, inputting characters and making selections as they go, the Storm forces you to “confirm” each input by lifting and raising your finger. That is to say, you can’t type “hey” with lifting your finger after the “h” and “e.” It’s a bit of a learning curve if you’re used to the iPhone way of doing things.

If you’re not, great; by all accounts, the Storm seems A-OK. It’s just that, with the iPhone so entrenched in people’s minds, and with Google’s infinite researchers about to support the launch of the T-Mobile G1, you wonder how RIM will cope. Being on Verizon Wireless is both a blessing and a curse—VZW has a history of locking phones down to the point of being unusable for anything beyond basic usage. That said, VZW’s national coverage really is tremendous; you can call from here to there without worrying about any dropped calls.

Also, if RIM is expecting Wall Street, the traditional home of the BlackBerry, to adopt it to please its “we want to get an iPhone” employees, it may need to think again, given that Wall Street is crumbling right before our very eyes. Do you really think Corporate is going to approve the purchase of a bunch of new, not entirely needed phones just to appease a few employees?

It does look nice, though.

BlackBerry Storm First Hands On [Giz]