14 DAY TRIAL // As assumed yesterday, when Telus Mobility officially unveiled the fact that it would launch RIM's new BlackBerry Storm in Canada, the other major Canadian CDMA carrier, namely Bell, also confirmed the release of the smartphone.
A Storm-related press release was not issued by Bell yet, but the carrier has updated its official website so as to include a page that presents the new BlackBerry smartphone. Of course, for the moment there is no exact release date for the Bellian Storm, but the handset will most probably be out before the year's end – just like in the case of the Telus version.
You can check out Bell's BlackBerry Storm page for yourselves, at this address, although you won't find too much info there – save for the highlight features of the handset, which you probably already know.
Still, in case you are not familiar yet with RIM's only touchscreen smartphone, its main specs include: a 3.25 inch TFT touchscreen display with 360 x 480 pixels and a "clickable" surface, on-screen full QWERTY keyboard, GPS and A-GPS, full HTML browser, a 3.5mm audio jack, a 3 Megapixel camera with auto focus and flash, document reader and editor, 1GB of internal memory, microSD/SDHC card slot and all the business-oriented features that any modern BlackBerry has.
The Canadian and the US versions of Storm (the latter being announced by Verizon) come with CDMA2000 1x EV-DO connectivity, plus world-wide GSM connectivity (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz) and HSDPA 2100. The Vodafone Storm lacks any CDMA flavor, but that won't be a problem at all, since the European carrier only owns GSM networks.
There is no pricing info on BlackBerry Storm for the moment, but we should expect the smartphone to come for about the same amount of money the Bold is sold for. Thus, a retail price tag of 600 – 700 USD will most likely be paired with the Storm.