Blackberry Curve

I currently own a Blackberry Curve 8300. The very first Blackberry Curve released. I am 110% satisfied with the phone in comparison to my previous smartphones which include : Treo 600(Sprint) which was my very first smartphone I paid for myself and was one of the first people in line at Best Buy to buy one. I was so excited about getting a phone and a palm pilot in one. No longer needing to carry a phone and an organizer as two seperate devices, but all in one and around the same size as my palm pilot.

I started having issues with calls dropping. Sprint technical wasn't very helpful so I moved to the Treo 700w(Verizon) which moved me from the very reliable Palm OS to Windows and introduced me to having to reboot a phone. The windows operating system locked up all the time and my dropped calls were still there but the difference was, Verizon technical tried different things to help me all the time. They finally stated "The Palm is first an organizer with a phone application. So the functionality as a phone isn't as strong as a phone with organizer functionality" So they suggested I try a different phone like the Motorola Q (Verizon), which is suppose to be a phone first then have organizer capabilities. What a Piece of SH*T! The worst phone I ever had in my life. The phone was locked up more then it wasn't. You wouldn't know the phone was locked up until you went to use it and it was completly unresponsive. To fix the phone you had to pull the battery out and put it back in and wait the 5 minutes for windows to boot back up. At first it didn't lock up that often, but as time went on, the phone started locking up once a week, once a day, then several times a day.

Verizon gave up and didn't know what to do which was a perfect opportunity for me to try AT&T. I moved to AT&T and got the Blackberry Curve and immediatly missed the touch screen the Treo's had but quickly adapted to the center scroll wheel. Two years now and the phone locked up once and I don't drop calls. Now it does happen on occasion when someone calls and the phone doesn't ring but shows I have a missed call. Not often, but it does happen. The Blackberry Curve also utilizes a non-proprietary min-usb cord for charging and sync'ing and a standard mini headset jack for headphones versus the proprietary connector most phones have.

So the summary is, the Blackberry Curve has been a reliable phone for me, easy to type on, small enough to put in my pocket, durable enough to been beat up and landing on concrete driveways and still functional. Loud enough to hear pretty good. I also discovered that if you have a mac you can do the following:

1. Charge your Curve by loading PocketMac
   
2. Use your Curve as a Bluetooth Modem
   
3. Combination with VMWare Fusion & Windows, Sync SplashID
   

The reason I am writing this is because I am now being forced to leave my blackberry for a Samsung Blackjack II, which is another windows phone that looks a whole lot like the Motorola Q. I have heard nothing but complaints from coworkers who already have this phone but free is hard to beat. Of course if I had to pay for a phone it would be the iPhone.

BIG issue with Windows Phones is they run a ton of services, just like your Windows Workstation does. You may not be using the application, but the service is started and using up resources (and in the case of the phone, battery). So if you compare a windows phone with any other operating system, you'll see the battery life is not nearly as good and you'll have lockups because when a service stops responding windows doesn't know what to do so the functionality of the device locks up.

Stay tuned for what I discover with the Samsung Blackjack II. Yes I know it is a three year old phone but I did not pick it out, it was picked out for me.