When I recently had the opportunity to upgrade my phone I chose the Blackberry Bold 9780. I was compelled towards this decision to due to the email and browsing functionality found in Blackberry's.

As a young person I was also attracted to the Blackberry due to the BBM messenger function, which has replaced traditional SMS. I must commend the Blackberry on these functions as I'm able to keep up to date and aware what is going on in my email accounts and in the world of social of networking. This has been useful for communicating and keeping up to date during daily life. What the Blackberry is designed to do it does very well and efficiently. The only negative is the downtime that experienced by RIM in the Blackberry server centers which led to significant downtime of Blackberry services, but that now looks like a one off.

The problems for me with my Blackberry have come more recently. Blackberry has always had something off a question mark surrounding questions of reliability something my friends have battled with but something I had never experienced until quite recently. The phone has not been reporting battery life accurately and turning its self off when I thought it had almost full power. It has also been in the habit of turning its self off for no particular reason occasionally as well. While these minor issues haven't led to the end of the world they are an annoyance I could be without.

The Blackberry also appears to be losing out to over Smartphone platforms when it comes to available applications with what seems to be more apps widely available on other smartphone platforms. Though this isn't of major concern to me some may feel dissatisfied.

Overall those minor issues do not majorly detract from what I great phone I believe the Blackberry to be. But these reliability issues have sent a few of my friends away from Blackberry to over smart phone competitors, which also evident in Blackberry's currently flagging commercial performance.