I’m the first to admit that my fanboyish love for RIM and the Blackberry is virtually boundless. My first experience with the Curve radically and permanently altered by outlook on the mobile phone market. Since that day more than one year ago, the Blackberry Bold’s announcement has left me pining with short patience. To wit, my Twitter stream tells the tale of suffering as AT&T delays its US release time and time again. But I don’t blame you for AT&T’s failure, RIM. We could have a thing, you and I.

Sometimes loving someone also means summoning the courage to be frank, and I have to say that you dropped the ball on this one, RIM. This bizarre ecosystem you’re developing around the Blackberry Storm smells of competition with the iPhone, and I’m loathe to say that it’s not very good. As if gadgetophiles everywhere were not baffled by this and every other upcoming product but the Bold, you tied your app store to the Storm alone. Of even greater absurdity is that your app store — now a hallmark of a complete smartphone offering — is carrier-specific.

If Verizon’s record with their Download it Now service is any indicator, everyone will be super excited to download half a dozen advertisements-as-apps with that garish red they love so dearly. Ditto AT&T and the blue they use in their we-would’ve-blown-up-Alderaan-first-if-it-weren’t-for-the-deathstar logo.

But the disappointment doesn’t end there, RIM. You guys appear to be flailing in a helpless “me too!” fashion with the centralize-and-push data management model you created. In the enterprise, nobody does rapid deployment of email, policies, and software like you do. When you created your shameful application center, pawned it off on vendors to wash your hands of it, and designed it to be as lame as possible, was your enterprise team asleep at the wheel? Gagged? Arsenic poisoning? I’m imploring you to help me figure this out.

So the story goes that I’m not the only one disappointed and a little hurt by your awful app store model. Along comes BerryStore, a third-party application store that works much like the iPhone’s. An initial offering of forty free applications presents some pretty solid entries: big names like Google, MSNBC, CNN and Opera are already on the roster. In addition to offering OTA downloads of quality applications, BerryStore takes developer submissions and will soon have a revenue-sharing model that allows for paid applications.

So, RIM, I ask how a fledgling third party beat you at your own game? They support more phones than you do, offer more software than you do, don’t rely on sketchy carriers, perform OTA installs, run the service from a dedicated application and are preparing for non-shareware applications.

Despite Canada’s numbing cold around this time of year, I think the crickets are managing to chirp.