As I am sure you are all aware, Verizon Wireless is launching the much-anticipated BlackBerry Storm tomorrow. This device is RIM’s first delve into a touchscreen mobile phone and swing at taking some of the market share away from Apple and the iPhone. We had a chance to get our hands on the Storm on the eve of the launch day and had some fun playing with the touchscreen and its unique clicking technology.

Obviously the most interesting part of the Storm is the single big button of a screen so we’ll just cut to the chase. The touchscreen in general works as you would expect, sensing your touch on the glass and allowing you to scroll through things like lists, menus and across maps. What’s different about the touchscreen on the BlackBerry Storm which sets it apart from other touchscreen phones is that the glass display is like a single large, mechanical button.

Verizon has now officially announced that RIM’s BlackBerry Storm 9530 will be available from Verizon wireless starting November 21. This smartphone is sure to be a hit as it’s BlackBerry’s first touchscreen (SurePress), and iPhone-competing device. It’s also the first device from Verizon set for Global 3G use.

The BlackBerry Storm is going for $199.99 with a two year contract and after a $50 mail-in rebate and will come bundled with an external 8GB microSD card to make sure you can save all that media you’ll be downloading from the high speed connection.

Nokia’s sexy 5800 XpressMusic is official. If you’ve been waiting, and I know you have, the phone will be shipping this quarter, available in black, red or blue, and will cost an affordable $392 unlocked, with an 8GB memory card. It will be powered by the S60 5th Edition operating system. Some features include a 3.2-inch 640 x 360 touchscreen, 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Dual LED flash, GPS, and Wi-Fi. It’s all set to go up against the iPhone.

We have talked about the Samsung Instinct before here at SlipperyBrick. This week Sprint announced that the phone would be available on June 20. The price for the device will be $129.99 after a 2-year contract and a $100 mail-in rebate.

The Instinct was originally pegged at a price of $199; Sprint surely felt pressure to drop the price after the iPhone 3G came in at $199. The Instinct looks very similar to the original iPhone, though it adds a couple buttons to answer and disconnect calls to the front.

I think most of our readers probably know that nothing like this is really ever free, but O2 has announced that when the new iPhone 3G launches in the UK on July 11 they will be offering it for free with certain monthly tariffs. Both the 8GB and the 16GB models will be given away if you want to pay a little more each month for an 18 month contract.

The new tariffs from O2 in the UK are already published and are offering the 8GB iPhone 3G free with a £45 (~$88) or £75 (~$146) monthly plan, and if you are going with the £75 plan you might as well get the 16GB model since it comes with that plan at no cost as well.

Steve Jobs and Apple officially announced the new iPhone 3G today set to ship July 11, Shortly after the 2nd version of the popular mobile handset appeared on the Apple Store giving some long-awaited answers and putting many rumors to bed about the changes to the iPhone.

Lots of applications and lots of games were highlights of the presentation today for the iPhone, showing off what can be done and what has been done with the iPhone SDK. Also included in this model is GPS mapping, support for more business-centric applications like Microsoft Exchange and of course the faster 3G wireless connection. Based on these features it’s very apparent that Apple was listening to requests and complaints after the launch of the original iPhone. Major issues like a maps with no GPS and an internet browser with too slow of a connection to use are no longer, or at least much less of an issue.

Today at WWDC Steve Jobs made the official announcement we’ve been waiting for - the 3G iPhone. For the most part the new model looks very similar to the original, but along with the high speed connection Apple did add in some other improvements.

Some of the new features highlighted today include a full plastic back, improved audio, a flush headphone jack, even thinner edges, solid metal buttons, GPS and all of this for a $199 price tag for the 8GB model. Apple is boasting that with the new 3G connection web pages load 2.8 times faster than the previous iPhone model and is faster than both the Nokia N95 and the Treo 750. The battery is expected to give 5-6 hours of web browsing, 8-10 hours of talk time (5 hours of 3G talk) and 24 hours of audio playback on a single charge.

The Touchwiz a.k.a the SGH-F480, is obviously an iPhone wannabe from Samsung, featuring an improved and super user friendly UI controlled with your finger, and a 5Mp AF camera with auto focus and a CMOS video lens.

It sports 8GB or memory, and even an FM radio. The F480 makes use of a new and unique img4.gif UI, with specially designed widgets to customise and personalise the use of your phone. It’s a slick looking phone. Talk time is 3hrs. It will hit the European market shortly. Not sure when we’ll see this in the U.S.

We had already seen some iPhone price cuts overseas for what many felt was to help clear out the non-3G inventory of phones in Europe, but now it appears that O2 has complete run out of stock with the 8GB and 16GB iPhones. We’ve still seen no official word on the release date, price or specs of a 3G iPhone but we can’t imagine it could be far off now that the inventory in the UK is depleted.

O2

In anticipation of a new iPhone model coming to Germany, T-Mobile has drastically slashed the price of the existing 8GB model from €399 to just €99 for German customers. This lower price equates to approximately $155 USD, where the 8GB iPhone is currently going for $399 with a 2 year contract in the United States.

The €99 iPhone is being offered for a limited time from April 7 through June 30 and comes with a 2 year plan for 89 euros a month. The 16GB model price appears to remain untouched with a price of €499. Apple has been rumored to have a new, faster 3G version of the iPhone in the works and this promotion may be a way to unload some of the older models prior to the launch. Alternatively it could also just be a promotion for Apple and T-Mobile to unload some of their inventory due to poor sales of the iPhone in the area due to the heavy competition of mobile handsets that are 3G enabled.

O2 has put out an official announcement that they will be bringing Apple’s iPhone to Ireland with the handset launching on March 14. Prices are listed at €399 ($590) for the 8GB model and €499 ($740) 16GB. Contracts range from 175 minutes a month up to 700 minutes and all come with 1GB of data transfer, with the pricing ranging from €45 ($67) to €100 ($148) for the 175 minute plan.

Today Apple announced the release of a new 16GB iPhone giving double the storage capacity in the device. The Apple store was down for a while this morning, just in the U.S., which especially on a Tuesday indicates the company had something new coming. When the site came back up the Apple store now shows two models, one with the original 8GB capacity for $399 and a new 16GB iPhone model for $499. All the specs aside from the increased storage capacity appear to be the same, and no, there was no 3G added into the 16GB model.

In addition to the iPhone getting some more storage, the iPod touch also saw an increase in its capacity to store music, pictures and video with Apple also announcing a 32GB version today as well. The 32GB iPod touch was added to the Apple store this morning retailing for $499, along with the existing 16GB model priced at $399 and the 8GB model going for $299.

Apple’s iPhone, winner of Time magazine’s invention of the year, went on sale in France tonight allowing residents to finally officially get their hands on the popular media smartphone. There’s more to the significance of this launch, however.

After months of bouts between iPhone hackers and Apple developers trying to keep the mobile phone “locked” and restricted to approved carriers, the French law requires that the phone not be restricted to any single mobile operator. France is the second country having this requirement for the iPhone after it was launched in Germany earlier this month and both countries are offering unlocked iPhones.

So an anonymous tipster sent in a purported AT&T internal inventory sheet which lists off an Apple iPhone in red with 4GB and one with 8GB. No price, no delivery date, nothing else except that this thing supposedly exists to AT&T. This is the first report that has surfaced of any kind of alternative color to the iPhone and of course it should be noted that Apple hasn’t said anything about its iPhone coming in another color besides white. Still, bear in mind the color variance of the Nano; did anyone out there really think that Apple wouldn’t release different color iPhones eventually? But why no mention of a black iPhone?

Here’s the other thing to bear in mind: will this “deep red” iPhone be out in time for the holiday shopping season?

Verizon went ahead and unleashed four new phones all at once targeted at the fall shopping season trying to get a share of AT&T’s iPhone dollars. The new lineup includes the Voyager and Venus from LG along with the narrow Samsung Juke and the Blackberry Pearl sporting EV-DO.

The headliner of this Verizon release party is the LG Voyager looking very similar to the iPhone from the outside with a large touchscreen on the face. Once you get your hands on the Voyager you’ll see that it’s a little bulkier than the iPhone and that touchscreen face actually hinges open to expose another display inside that faces a large QWERTY keyboard, hence the thickness. The Voyager also has V CAST Mobile TV, a microSD slot and a modest 2 megapixel camera.