Avoid the Storm!!!
I've had one since Jan and I'm breaking my contract, and taking the subsequent financial pain, next week. It's a pain to use. Slow to react, touch/click screen is a pain for accurate typing, it's quite heavy, voice quality is not great, and the apps are quite glitchy (the free ones anyhoo), doesn't have wifi...
Also, if you get a lot of calls, you'll miss half of them with the Storm. For example, if you have 'vibe & ring' activated, it'll vibrate for a few seconds and then ring for the remainder. What this means in actuality is that you won't feel the (very poor) vibrate alert, and will only hear the ringer at, say, the second ring (say) so to then answer the call before it gets diverted to vmail is a race.
If you get the phone on time, and check the caller, the phone will ALWAYS be in the opposite orientation to the way you pick it up (Murphys Law applies here). Two things can happen in this scenario; you'll either hold your nerve and wait till the orientation of the screen corrects itself (all the while the phone is ringing, btw), or; you'll turn the phone to the orientation in which the screen is displayed at the EXACT moment that it switched to the way you were holding it, so you're caught in the loop again!!!
If you miss the call and get a txt saying you've vmail, you cannot easily call 171 directly from the text, as highlighting the senders number (171) is almost impossible as it is at the top edge of the screen. The screen is sitting on one button located underneath it in the centre. This means that the closer to the centre of the screen, the better/more accurate/more responsive it is to select/type. You need to exit the text message, then hit the 'call' key, then type in 171, and hit 'call' again.
All of these things combined are hugely frustrating and take away from the usability of the thing, and the pleasure in having a pretty nice bit of kit, but not a patch on the iPhone for useability.
I'd think of staying with the Pearl, tbh.