Earlier in the summer, some words from Verizon chief Ivan Seidenberg led us all to believe that he wanted his firm to take full control of Verizon Wireless. Now, Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao has made clear that his outfit had precisely zero plans to sell its 45% stake in VZW, though he did mention having an "open mind" about the future of said stake. Just in case that wasn't definitive enough for ya, he stressed that staying put was "the best thing" for Vodafone right now, and given just how many Storms are flying off of US shelves, we can't stand to disagree.

We're still waiting on Verizon to stop teasing us about this thing, but Vodafone (who's been hinting at the phone since last month) just announced the BlackBerry Storm, RIM's touchscreen flagship. As if you didn't know already, Vodafone is confirming a 3.25-inch 480 x 360 touchscreen, 3.2 megapixle camera, automatic orientation flipping, 1GB of built-in storage and a host of multimedia capabilities, including iTunes sync.

Typically, Vodafone saves its name-brand manufacturer partners from having to suffer the embarrassment of offering crap handsets by stuffing all of the super low-end stuff under its own marque, but the new VF830 seems to buck that trend pretty hard. The prepaid-only handset (really, Voda?) totally looks like it could be a midrange model from the likes of Samsung or LG, featuring a full 3.2 megapixels of shooting power and HSDPA in a sleek, all-black slider package. It runs just £80 (about $139), too -- contract-free, of course, since it's prepaid. What's the world coming to?