Early arriving crowds, particularly in the Northeast, exhausted the supply of BlackBerry Storm cell phones at a number of Verizon Wireless stores Friday.

This reporter was one of the disappointed many who arrived too late and left empty-handed.

I went to two Verizon Wireless stores in search of the phone that sports a revolutionary clickable touch screen interface, but had no luck.

At the first store, in Fishkill, New York, I was told that the company’s computer system was down in the entire northeast United States, but I could wait around until the system came back up.

No thanks.

At a Verizon Wireless store in neighboring Poughkeepsie, New York, I was told that the computer system was working fine but my Storm would be shipped to me by Wednesday of next week.

Why?

“We pretty much sold out,” the manager said. It was 2:00 p.m. ET on Friday afternoon.

Neither store was overrun with customers at the time. About 75 customers total were in both stores – a little more than the standard Friday crowd in the Mid-Hudson River Valley, in upstate New York.

“We had people lining up at our stores at 5:30, 6:00 in the morning and some of our stores sold through their inventory pretty quickly,” Verizon Wireless representative Brenda Raney said. “But we have plenty more in our warehouse and we are taking orders. You will get the phone in four to five days.”

The computer system was indeed overwhelmed for about an hour, Ms. Raney said, but she was not sure of the geographical extent of the outage.

The Storm, made by Canada’s Research In Motion, is the latest contender at the high end of the consumer market, joining Apple’s iPhone and HTC’s G1 Google phone.

It is aimed squarely at the consumer market, but it may be the first credible touch-screen phone for mobile professionals, according to ABI Research analyst Kevin Burden.

“RIM had an idea of how to preserve the BlackBerry experience on a touch screen device,” he said. “A compelling on-screen QWERTY keyboard and back-end email will appeal to the mobile professional and IT administrators.”