There are times when, in an effort to outstrip the competition, a manufacturer comes up with something so left-field, we’re not sure whether it’s a good thing or not.

That’s certainly the case with the BlackBerry Storm, which we’ve just had our very first play with ahead of receiving proper review samples next week. It’s RIM’s first
touchscreen phone but that’s not the contentious thing. As we’ve highlighted in our previous news stories, the 3.25in 480 x 360 screen is not only tappable, but also clickable.

RIM is clearly attempting to steal a march on the competition. Every man and his dog has a touchscreen phone now and some are better than others but no one has yet come up with this concept. It works like this: you press the screen to highlight a button, then press the screen in to click, a bit like the trackpad on the latest Apple MacBook range.

Is this because it’s a completely mad idea? Or does it actually work? Just like the MacBook trackpad, we suspect it will have a mixed reception. In our brief tete-a-tete with the device we found navigation, especially with the web browser was something that we had to ‘get used to’ rather than something that was instantly intuitive.

We can certainly see the benefit for touchscreen typing – we’ve always found having something physical to click preferable to simply tapping away at an unresponsive plate of glass or plastic. And after a few sentences we found that “The quick brown fox…” was beginning to get up to something of a trot. We particularly liked the way the keyboard switched from full Qwerty to a 20-key predictive pad depending on the orientation of the screen, thanks to an accelerometer inside.

The software on the handsets we tested clearly wasn’t final build (it launches on the 14th, so fingers crossed), so we’ll hold off on passing judgement just now. But we’ll have a full production model very soon – keep an eye on this site for the full review.