I have a BB 8200 ("Pearl Flip")
http://worldwide.blackberry.com/blackberrypearl/8200/
Given a choice I would have opted for an iPhone, but the carrier didn't support it when I was looking, and I (foolishly) thought I didn't want to change carriers. Telus had been promising "We'll be able to carry iPhone soon" but I thought "Yeah, I've heard that before, I want something now, not 6 months from now."
Anyhow, the long and short of it is, I hate the Blackberry, and I hate Telus. Here's why.
- (Like someone else mentioned) The trackball suck.
- The screen is tiny. Webpages are hard to read. You can make them readable by putting it into "column mode" but it too sucks. It's a hack, not a solution. Pages look terrible, if there's a pulldown menu somewhere you have to scroll all over heck's half acre to find it, and even if you do, there's no guarantee it will work. Also, not sure if this is the phone or Telus, but larger pages have a tendency to stop loading at some random point before the end. No amounts of refresh will cause it to stop at any other random point (or better yet, make it to the end). SO reading a thread on Canreef for example, there will be posts you can't read until you get home and can read the thread using the "real" internet.
- (On that last point, there is an app you can use to read vbulletin, forget what it's called, it's really meant for iPhone but there is a BB beta version .. which sucks.)
- Telus said "Buy this phone! It has GPS on it!" And I said "Wow, GPS! That's so cool!". What they didn't say was that they block the GPS port so that google maps can't access the GPS and can only use cell tower triangulation to locate you. Stellar. Nothing like finding out "Your location within 2000m" when
YOU HAVE GPS ON YOUR PHONE!!! Strangely enough, if you use Telus's Navigator software, at a modest fee of $5 per month or whatever .. it works just fine. What they don't tell you though is that Telus Navigator is one of the worst pieces of software badly written ever put out there (and trust me, I have a reasonable lay to claim what counts as badly written software). There is a hack to workaround this and fix it, but you have to be comfortable in hacking into the assembly code of your phone, which is not pretty ... and shouldn't be necessary in the first place. The fact that they did this sneaky underhanded thing is despicable and they have lost me as a customer forever .. once my stupid contract is up. All I say more on this is to suggest you do yourself a favour: if you're with them and at a breakpoint between contracts, consider an alternative carrier now. You'll probably be glad you did.
I could go on and on and on. But I won't.
Just get the iPhone and be done with it.