I decided to get my Blackberry while in my first year of uni. Whilst looking around in lectures I noticed that almost everyone had a Blackberry and so decided to get one for myself. I purchased mine from Virgin for £12 a month with the handset free on an 18 month contract. This is a very good price for a smartphone. I have had mine now for a year and it is by far the best phone I have ever had.

Packaging
The handset comes in a typical carboard box along with the charger, battery, handsfree headset, USB cable, user guide and PC software CD. Everything is packed securely and wrapped into clear plastic bags.

Appearance
My Blackberry is plain black although I have seen other variations including purple and silver ones. On the front of the phone at the top is a small light. This flashes red every time you have a new email, text etc. which I find to be a very useful feature and below this is the blackberry logo. The phone has a reasonable sized screen (width 5cm x length 4cm). Below the screen is a set of clearly marked buttons which are from left to right call, menu, return and end call/switch off. In the centre of these is the track pad. Below this is the qwerty keyboard. The sides of the phone are rubbery for grip and have several more buttons including volume, camera and a play button at the very top. The back of the phone has the blackeberry logo repeated and has a smooth removable part. Overall the phone looks very modern and attractive. It is flat and quite small and not very heavy so fits nicely in pockets. The only drawback is that I find the back of the phone and the screen gets scratched very easily although you can buy rubber cases which protect the casing and often come with a clear plastic bit to go over the screen for protection.

Features
This blackberry has some truly useful features unlike some phones which have things that you never actually use. Features include email which is by far the best and most used feature on my phone. It is simple to set up by putting in your email address and password and then the blackberry finds it for you. You can choose from hotmail, yahoo, windows live and others. You can also open attachments. The camera is 2.0 MP and is quite average. It is certainly not the best quality camera but the track pad makes it very easy to scroll through images. It also has a video recorder. This is not something I have used much but again it seems average quality. The voice recorder is great if you speak next to the phone but as you get further away the sound quality gets worse, so not great for lectures. The GPS is really useful. You can type in a specific location or just a general place eg pizza shop and you will be given a choice of different routes to take and directions which you can both read and view on a map. The map is great. You can zoom in or out easily and it will find your current location for you if you ask it to. The calendar is useful as it lets you put in specific times and set alarms for certain events. There is also a password keeper and a memopad which I find very useful when I don't have a post-it nearby. The phone also has instant messaging including facebook and blackberry messenger as well as a media player but I have not used these features much. There are also the basic features such as a calculator and alarm clock as well as version of Word, Excel and Powerpoint available. Overall the entertainment features are not great as this is not what the blackberry was designed for. It does however make up for these by the great quality business and organisation features it has.

Battery Life
The battery life of this phone is pretty good. Mine tends to last for at least 3 days before it starts to loose charge. The red light which tells you of new emails and texts will flash yellow when the phone is low on charge. When the charge becomes very low the light will flash red until the phone automatically switches itself off.

Overall this is a fantastic phone, paticularly for students as it is cheap and lets you organise your time and work while at the same time giving access to entertainment features such as media player and istant messaging. It has some really great features and the graphics are also really good. It is very simple to use and it dosen't take long find your way around it. I would definitely reccomend.