• Flipboard: This has become my favorite news application on any platform. You provide RSS feeds (or select from pre-entered sites) and Flipboard generates a digital magazine style view of the articles, complete with images and cleaned up typography. You can slide the item up to view the original article, email articles and share with various social networks from within the app as well. I’ve been surprised how much faster I can get through my daily news. One big complaint: get with it guys, add Read It Later support!
• Read It Later: Lovely interface to read through your Read It Later list. There’s a flipboardesque style view available for an additional cost, which was a little disappointing. I do love RIL though, so I’ll probably fork over another few bucks to support them as well. [Update, 2011-05-09: I highly recommend buying the Digest view, and anything I said about it disparagingly can be safely ignored. Aside from turning your list into a great Flipboard view, it figures out categories for you, and does a fine job. Good form, Peter.]
• Terra: An alternate web browser. I started using this because of the very intuitive and useful gesture navigation. Two fingers swiped left or right takes you back and forward in your browsing history and three fingers is used to switch between tabs. This greatly speeds up browser use. There are plenty of other cool features as well! [UPDATE, 2011-05-11: Apple has apparently told Readdle to remove Terra from the AppStore. Sure, there's some duplication with Safari, but everyone I've shown it to thinks it's a clearly improved experience. Curmudgeons.]
• Adobe Ideas: A drawing app that makes your art a little more… artistic. It smoothes out lines and curves, so your shaky squiggles look a bit more intentional. Not bursting at the seams with features, but great for some quick brainstorming and illustrations.
• TED: Awesome free app to view all current TED talks. Easy to search and get summaries at a glance. I’m watching a lot more of these now!
• tChess Pro: Very full-featured and well-made chess application. You can use it to learn via the decent AI, move analysis, gameplay instructions, hints and other features. There are a variety of views, angles and appearances so you can view the board however you see fit. You can even email games back and forth and move the board around with gestures!
• FlickrFrame: You provide your Flickr credentials and select a set or other criteria and FlickrFrame pulls up a full-screen slideshow of your images. Rotation speed and animation are configurable, so it makes a great photo frame from your iPad.
• Netflix: Not as full-featured as you might wish, a cause of some complaints, but it still works wonderfully to stream from your instant queue, search for items, etc. And the iPad form factor definitely works out very well for a mobile movie center.
• Speed Test: Just what you might think: easy and quick way to view your current download and upload rates. Good for checking on the go or verifying home network speeds.
• TWC Max+: Was just looking for a simple weather app, but this was free so I gave it a shot. Turns out it’s pretty great! It provides current radar and other usual weather fare for as many locations as you’d like to configure. Alerts and some (rather useless) social media stuff is available as well.
• CoderCheat: Free app providing a number of helpful and commonly used programming reference/cheat sheets. It doesn’t have a huge variety of languages, but even with just CSS, HTML, Javascript, MySQL, PHP, Python and Regex it was sure good enough for free!

The primary annoyance I have with it is its speed. Application response, portrait/landscape orientation switching, and general use can be a little sluggish at times. It’s nowhere near unusable, however, and various issues, such as the orientation switching, have been improved via phone updates. I was also put off at first by the touchscreen, my first touchscreen phone experience being that of the iPhone. But the more I use it, the more I appreciate it. I was blessed with sausage links for digits, so the ability to see a button highlighted before pressing it is helpful. Also the select/copy/cut ability is quite useful.

What really started improving the experience for me was installing certain applications.

Favorites Apps

• Weatherbug: After experiencing flashbacks of the wretchedly annoying piece of spyware of the same name on PCs of yesteryear, I found the Storm client to be perfectly useful. Perhaps they have cleaned up their act. Once you configure your location, the icon (which you can add to the Home menu), shows an image of the current weather, along with current temp, high and low for the day. The temperature information is also added to the top of your home screen. Install link.
• Flickr: This application allows you to upload images from your phone directly to your Flickr account! Awesome! If you have a GPS-enabled phone, you can also geotag the photos as well. Install link.
• Google Maps: Google Maps that you know and love, but optimized for touchscreen mobile devices. I like it better than the Storm’s built-in maps application because of the satelite view option.
• YouTube: Wonderfully optimized for portrait view and a touchscreen, this allows you to search and view videos on YouTube. Search results are horizontally scrollable in a fashion reminiscent of Cover Flow. Lots of fun!
• FlyCast: Streaming radio, tons of channels (over 1000) and genres, easy to use! You can also install a PC version and do cool things between them, but basically all I care about is lots of streaming music on the go.

Gotchas

• Missing applications:
  As I started installing applications, I ran into a number of cases where the application would say it was installed successfully, but was seemingly nowhere to be found in the Applications folder or the Home menu. After calling VZW PDA support (keep that number handy: 866-221-4096), it turns out that they were all located in the Downloads folder. You can just move them into the Applications or Home folder and all is well.
• GPS:
  You might expect to be able to use the Storm’s GPS capabilities with any GPS-aware application, but you would be thinking wrongly. Sadly, only certain applications (the built-in Maps and VZ Navigator so far) can currently access GPS information. Verizon support told me BlackBerry may make an update at some point to change this, but for now, no satellite love.
• Updates:
  Get them. The Storm is BlackBerry’s first touchscreen, so there is a lot of learning going on for everyone. Updates often improve performance and fix a lot of annoying bugs, so get them as soon as you can.
• SureType:
  While the native phone interface allows you to switch between the landscape QWERTY and portrait SureType/MultiTap, some applications (mainly those not made for the Storm) only allow SureType. And it’s profoundly annoying. It takes me about 10 times as long to type things in, especially email addresses. Not much you can do about it.

All in all, the BlackBerry Storm is a useable, fun, and powerful device. It might not fulfill all your dreams, but it can add a lot of computing resources to your mobile arsenal.