President Obama and I have one thing in common: we both love our Blackberrys.
I just got a new Blackberry Storm in today, and I completely love the thing already. A few of its nicer (for me) features:
In addition to the phone, it has a built in MP3 player and GPS that, while less than perfect, are both quite serviceable. No need to buy a separate GPS or iPod!
In addition to desktop synchronization with Outlook, Google has an app to synchronize my contacts list and calendar with the ones I have saved in Gmail and Google Calendar (which I use FAR more than Outlook). I'm completely in love with this part, as I FINALLY have one stop contact synchronization along with a "server" backup. Gmail is now my official contact list storage - and I can sync it to my Blackberry and from there sync it to Outlook. Hallelujah! Oh, and no more re-entering contact info with a new phone. I'm done with that crap.
While I'm on the subject, I would like to comment on Google and mobile devices: rock on, guys! Here's just one of the many nice touches: instead of having to go to "mobile.google.com", their web site for mobile devices is "m.google.com". That may seem like small potatoes - until you have to type it on a stupid mobile device's keyboard.
With that said, however, the "landscape" version of the Blackberry's keyboard is actually quite usable. It's the first mobile device I've ever said that about, too. It's not perfect, but I can live with it, and with "two thumb" typing I can actually achieve a decent typing speed even without much practice.
The device isn't perfect. Here are a few issues I have with it:
For power reasons, the GPS doesn't stay synched unless you're using a GPS app. It's not the end of the world, but it can be annoying at times.
Speaking of the GPS, the built in Navigation app (Verizon's VZ Navigator) requires a monthly service charge. Um, no thanks. Enter Google maps! Nowhere near as nice (it doesn't have a friendly voice to give you turn-by-turn directions), but it's FREE. One more score for Google.
The touch screen really needs some kind of calibration tool. I'm getting used to it, but I'd far rather make IT get used to ME.
Theoretically I should be able to set it up so that personal e-mail gets sent to the Blackberry even though I don't have a Blackberry Enterprise Server to connect to. I haven't yet figured out how to do this, and I'm kind of good at this sort of thing (to put it mildly). If this functionality actually exists, they've made it too hard. If it doesn't exist, it should
Despite these issues, I'm quite happy with it. Based on what I read, I hear the iPhone is perhaps a notch better... but it also A) costs a lot more, B) requires that I switch to AT&T, and C) would require me to purchase a Mac in order to do custom application development (something I fully intend to play with). Any one of those is a deal killer for me, and all three combined... yeah. This is working out quite nicely, however.
Time to go bust out the development kit and see what kind of trouble fun I can get into.
Update: I got my e-mail integrated with the Blackberry. It was quite simple, I just had to look a bit to find it.