BlackBerry Storm: RIM's first touchscreen, the 'Edsel of smartphones'

The BlackBerry Storm, launched with Verizon in November 2008, was Research In Motion's answer to the iPhone — its first touchscreen phone. Where Apple had a capacitative screen that responded to a tap, RIM bet on SurePress, a screen that physically clicked down like a trackball before it registered your input. It was meant to keep the BlackBerry feel on a touchscreen; instead it made every tap feel like pressing a stiff button.

Buyers did not warm to it. The Storm sold 500,000 units in its first month and 1 million by January 2009, but Verizon ended up replacing almost all of the one million Storms it had sold in 2008, and RIM wrote down roughly $500 million in unsold inventory. Critics were savage: Stephen Fry called it 'the Edsel of smartphones,' and the book Losing the Signal called it the single biggest disaster in smartphone history.

The failure was a bet on the wrong input. RIM knew touchscreens were coming but refused to let touch be touch, so it shipped a screen that added a mechanical click to every action. The Storm never caught up to the device it was meant to beat, and it was superseded by the Storm 2 a year later, a cautionary tale of defending a keyboard-era habit against a better interface.