I've never been into phones much, but when my old phone broke about a year ago I decided to get myself a blackberry, as it seemed everyone had them. When I first got it I was attached to it for weeks, amazed at BBM mainly and the internet. It has been the best phone I've had.

A lot of people complain, saying they've had problems with theirs, etc, but touch wood, mine's been great so far. Apart from a few scratches and scraps it's still in good condition. I admit, I have dropped it a few times, but it's never damaged the phone. My boyfriend dropped his iPhone a month ago, shattered the screen.

A downside to the Blackberry is occasionally it can run slow if you ask it to do too many things. Also sometimes it randomly turns itself off and reboots, which takes forever, or so it seems and takes a chunk of your battery. I'll never understand why the blackberry feels the need to reboot itself.

The battery life on a blackberry is decent, in my opinion, but if your the type of person who sits on their phone for hours, texting, BBMing and facebooking, then yes, your battery will die pretty soon, but that's the same with any phone I'm sure. However if you have a Blackberry you'll need to charge it pretty much every night, otherwise the battery will only last a day and a half.

The camera on the Blackberry fairly decent. It has a flash, so you can take pictures at night when you're out and about, which is something you can't do with an iPhone as there is no flash. I always take pictures with my Blackberry when I'm out and about, using the flash they can sometimes turn out blurry if someone in the picture moves.

The keypad on the Blackberry is something that I love. It's really fast to type with it, much better than a touch screen where your fingers risk hitting other letters. You can type your message then quickly hit the enter button. At first it's hard to get use to if you've been use to a standard phone, where your scroll through the letters, but after a few weeks you'll be use to it.

At the top of the phone there is a lock button that you quickly press to lock the phone, however, it's easy to hit that button again and unlock the phone. Then you end up accidentally ringing your Auntie Sue who you haven't spoken to for 3 years. It happens. Another button at the top is the mute button, which is really easy to hit whilst your on the phone to someone. The other person's shouting "Hello?" and you're screaming back, "Hello!"

With your Blackberry you have everything at your fingertips. The internet, facebook, twitter, texting, BBM, etc. I find the internet can be slow occasionally, taking a while to load just one internet page, but this depends on where you are and your signal. If you're connected to your Wi-Fi at home then it loads fast, but if you're out and about, it can be slow at times.

When texting someone back on a Blackberry it comes up with your texting history. So if you're replying to a long text it's easy to just scroll up, read the previous text and go back to what you were writing. However if you don't text someone in a few months Blackberry will delete the conversation history with the person, or it does on my phone. One annoying thing with the texting is if you receive a long text sometimes you only receive part of, say the beginning or the end and it'll say [Receiving Text]. If you're lucky enough you'll receive the whole text a few minutes late, but it doesn't always work like that. A lot of the time I've had to text back saying, "Send that again please?"

When you receive a BBM, text, facebook notification, or anything along those lines then the small light at the top of your phone flashes red. I find this helpful, as if I'm doing something and I want to know if someone's spoken to me, etc, I just look at my phone to see if it's flashing red. However, sometimes I find the light does flash red for no reason at all. You can also download programs to change the color of your light, so it can flash blue or green.

Blackberry does have it's own app world, but don't expect anything exciting. There you can download the basic apps such as Twitter, Facebook, Ebay and other stuff, but it isn't great for downloading games as a lot of the games you have to pay for, and they aren't cheap. I also find the apps can take a long time to download and you can't go off and do other things as the phone is busy downloading an app, so it'll just come up with a little black clock, which basically freezes the phone.