More than any other cell phone that I've reviewed, the BlackBerry Storm from Verizon Wireless is the phone that either you'll love or you'll hate. There's no in-between. That's because this intriguing, quirky smart phone has some features that shine and others that flop.

The most important aspect of the Storm is that it's a BlackBerry, which means it has a strong set of smart phone features allowing you to manage your calendar, contacts and e-mail handily. This set of features always has made BlackBerry a favorite of business users; and the Storm doesn't disappoint here.

The feature that differentiates it from the pack though is its touch screen. Because of the touch screen, you might want to compare it to the Apple iPhone; but I don't think that's a good comparison. The audiences are basically different -- consumer for the iPhone, business for the Storm. And the application sets of the two phones diverge too. Applications for the iPhone tend to be more fun. Storm applications more serious.

The touch screen on the Storm also is what differentiates it from other BlackBerry phones, which use BlackBerry's traditional wheel or pearl cursor control and smaller, non-touchable screens. The Storm's touch screen is very easy on the eyes. It is big, has nice resolution and works well as you pan and zoom with simple flicks of your finger.

Yet, as I said earlier, it's quirky. For instance, you can't use it while wearing gloves. With gloves on, the sensors can't tell where your fingers are -- I'm guessing it senses the heat or charge of your body.

The most annoying thing about the touch screen is that it is often inaccurate -- although consistent. While it's nice to hear and feel the click when you push an on-screen button, the screen makes you touch lightly before pushing, so it can sense where your finger is.

I have found the sensor to consistently choose menu items that aren't exactly where my finger is touching. They're lower than my finger's position on the screen. For the big icons on the BlackBerry main screen and to pan-and-zoom, this is fine. But it makes it difficult to choose from a pop-up menu, and it's easy to select the wrong phone number to call from your history of previous calls -- or any other on-screen list. I find myself trying to point to a screen position slightly above the selection I want to make because that's the only way to push the right menu choice. That happened on both the pre-release model and the production phone that I used, leading me to believe it's a design issue, not a hardware problem.

The phone is smart enough to flip from portrait to landscape orientation depending on how you hold the phone, but I found it's often too quick to jump into landscape mode. I also wish it had a case, because other items in my pocket turn on its screen light. The most noticeable missing item, though, is the well-designed pearl cursor control found on other BlackBerries. It would come in handy for one-handed use.

The Storm is a great first attempt by RIM to turn its flagship BlackBerry brand into a touch-screen; but it feels like a 1.0 version -- the first of what will undoubtedly be a popular line of touch screen smart phones.

If you can get beyond the quirks, you'll probably love the Storm, including its 3.2 megapixel camera, the 8 Gigabyte flash memory card and the other nice features.

With more than 1 million Storms already in circulation, it sure seems like the public loves it.