More iPhone vs. Storm: Neither was for me

I've come full-circle.

Last night, I returned a Blackberry Storm, the same one I purchased 29 days earlier when I returned an iPhone I'd bought a couple of weeks before that. As it turns out, after struggling over which one would be best for me, I decided that neither of them was the right one.

Regular readers might recall that I returned the iPhone because of weak AT&T service in my area. I loved the phone itself - the variety of available apps was my favorite thing - but I just couldn't see paying $100-plus every month for a phone that had subpar service. As a Verizon Wireless customer, I already knew the service was strong. And as a longtime Blackberry user, I knew I'd have no trouble figuring out how to use the Storm.

But I found the Storm's touchscreen and accelerometer - the technology that shifts the screen between portrait and landscape modes - to be buggy.

The keys were slow to react and there were times that the accelerometer would get stuck on landscape mode, no matter how much I moved it around.

I also had trouble - get this - making an actual phone call. There really was no quick way to just make a simple phone call. Getting to a dialpad or the contacts list wasn't necessarily hard. But it was a cumbersome process to get there. While I am mostly an email/text kind of guy, I occasionally need to make an actual call and the Storm made it too hard.

For me, it wasn't worth the money spent.

Now that I've returned the Storm, I'm still eligible for my contract-renewal upgrade. I know it's just a rumor, but until Apple actually does offer up the iPhone for Verizon Wireless, I think I'll just stick with my old Blackberry - and hang on to my money.