BASKING RIDGE, USA - Unsubstantiated rumors have been circulating for a week regarding the original Storm 9530 from Blackberry being discontinued by Verizon Wireless in the USA.

Mobile and Wireless has reported that investors and analysts were speculating about a report that the Storm may be dropped from Verizon’s product offerings. Verizon and RIM have no comment. If the speculation is limited to the original Storm 9530, it makes sense, the device has been out for over a year, has had a new version released behind it, the Storm 2, and RIM has already indicated that updates for devices that have less than 256MB RAM are not going to be supported on future OS releases.

The Storm was released with a lot of bugs and an OS that froze and glitched daily. It was an attempt by RIM to counter the iPhone, and eventually it did get better, after months of work by the user community and RIM to iron out the OS. The Storm 2 release a year later was much smoother, with a better OS, more memory and the great majority of the bugs fixed. The Storm started slow and gained momentum.

If the Storm 9530 does get cut, it makes sense, if Verizon is looking to cut both the Storm 1 and Storm 2, that makes a bit less sense, there are still users and prospects that like the touchscreen and don’t want the iPhone with AT&T.

There have been other rumors of touchscreen-based RIM devices that have a keyboard slider, and another revised version of the Storm (Storm 3?). It seems natural that older devices are phased out as newer ones come in, the normal life-cycle of the electronic device. Some of this discussion could be that we are still not used to the speed of obsolescence in this industry.