I could type 55 wpm on the keyboard. Every time I use a screen keyboard I feel like I lose 10 IQ points. I can use a physical keyboard without looking, but the screen keyboard takes twice as long and consumes my full attention if I want any speed.
The blackberry felt like an extension of my brain on the internet. Touchscreen devices feel like an extension of the internet in my brain + eyes, not as nice.
I used my blackberry bold for years, then for months more after the battery swelled, until the charging port finally stopped working
I loved my blackberry's keyboard, but I adjusted to iOS on-screen keyboard (starting circa the iPhone 4S) pretty well. Last couple of years though iOS autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong (incorrectly changing were->we're, ill->i'll for example. and today changing "Torvalds" to "Torshavn" or something when I was talking about Linus and not the Faroes).
If someone has a nice phone with a physical keyboard I'd seriously consider it when I replace my iPhone
> autocorrect has started to be extremely aggressive and frequently very wrong
First thing I do when setting up a new phone is turning off auto correct and auto capitalization. Yes, I still make mistakes, but I prefer becoming quite handy at using my backspace button than having to fight the auto correct all damn time.
SwiftKey is getting buggier but is still a massive step up from the default since it:
- works with more languages
- can be configured to suggest completions and corrections but not auto-apply them
(If anyone from MS/SwiftKey team wonders: these days if I delete a word and start on a new it shows both the original word and the best predictions for the new word. Thankfully it only inserts the new one - but sadly it inserts two spaces.)
And since this is a startup forum, some advice if anyone else reads this:
1. don't skimp on testers. Good testers are extremely valuable.
2. give us users a way to give you feedback! You get a lot of rubbish (I know, I am a dev who sometimes work on products with easily available feedback channels) but without it feedback like this ends up on open forums like here - or we are just silent and mightily annoyed and ready to forgive quite a lot from the next app/keyboard/service that actually fixes the stupid thing your product didn't fix.
There appears to be some speculation about something changing on the iOS keyboard / autocorrect, causing it to get worse in the past few years. You're not alone!
I miss the full keyboard so much. I didn’t need predictive text, had real tactile feedback and that little wheel mouse was pretty good too.
The amount of typos and reliance on auto-correct (often incorrectly correcting) proves that this the touchscreen is a somewhat cackhanded input method, even with a full qwerty keyboard on a very large screen. I’m on iPhone Max Pro, still fat-fingering the keys while typing this.
Swiftkey seems nice until you're not an english native speaker, which means you automatically write in 2 languages (native and at least some english). Now good luck having the keyboard guess which dictionary to use for every single word, which can even lead to mistakes if both suggest the same thing (capitalization).
I care about not having a wrong word in the middle of every other sentence.
And even that doesn't change the simple fact that typing on it is cumbersome. Swiftkey is a little better on average, but still not even close to an actual keyboard.
I used Swiftkey for a few years and thought it couldn't get better... until I found Fleksy.
The autocompletion is just superb and nowhere near anything I tried before. It's made for typing without looking or worrying about hitting the right keys, so if you're not really comfortable with Swiftkey-like typing, you might wanna give it a try.
I try to use this but I reliably end up getting the wrong word, which leads to some strange swypo typos. Here's a quick test, what I wanted to type on top and what came out on bottom:
> I could type 55 wpm on the keyboard. Every time I use a screen keyboard I feel like I lose 10 IQ points.
This precisely. I don't miss "BlackBerry the ecosystem" but I do really miss "BlackBerry the form factor".
For someone "into" keyboards (as in: taking the time to evaluate different switches to see which one I like best, for example), having to input anything on a smartphone is a really sad joke.
I managed to somehow type on the software keyboard without looking at it with a 95% or so accuracy. However I find that I’m only able to do so on my iPhone SE which is small size.
Do you ever try using a bluetooth keyboard with a mobile phone? They're certainly not as good as a nice mechanical keyboard, but they can improve the text input experience many times over a screen keyboard.
Has anyone ever designed a slide out BT keyboard for phones? It could be a single size part with attachments for the different phone models. Or a pop socket style where it just glues onto your phone/case.
Reminds me of the Sidekick, but not the one that slides vertically but the one that spun around. God I wish they'd make a modern Android phone like it.
Yes I miss it everyday, I feel so clumsy typing on a piece of glass, and make soo many typos. I could type BLIND without typos whole emails while maintaining a casual conversation (much to the annoyance of my girlfriend). There are a lot of BlackBerry-stans still on crackberry.com holding out on older and newer BlackBerry phoned (key2 being the latest).
Really loved my Q10 with bb10os and my Keyone running Android! Sadly security updates stopped so had to get a slab, and run Blackberry Inbox on it (unified inbox of all your messaging apps, it is quite nice).
BlackBerry licensed Onward Mobility to make another keyboard phone, although they promised one this year, they are so silent I would be surprised if they are able to.
Bb10 was really a supernice OS, a lot of android and iOS stuff is inspired by it. blackberry still has some amazing patents and software, so it isn't a goner, but no phones directly from them anymore, only licensees (India, Indonesia, and hopefully worldwide via Onward Mobility)
I never knew the glorydays of bb07, but sure know if they stayed succesfull then (I.e. made less catastrophic mistakes and made strategic choices away from business products when they had a significant mobile phone marketshare ) how cool it might have been now with them still in the mobile phone field.
I really am surprised that with of all models of Android phones in the world, no one is making one with a keyboard. Even if it was a niche product, you'd think there would be an audience...
I'm typing this from my Unihertz Titan Pocket, which was very successfully crowd funded recently. It's a good little phone. Prior to that I had a Blackberry Key2 whinch was pretty much the perfect Android phone IMHO. I have a Gemini PDA which is a great concept but the hinge isn't practical.
Before that a blackberry Passport which ran BBOS. Loved it too, at the time.
These devices do exist, and the niche is strong enough to support a small market segment.
It is actually quite hard to make a GOOD physical keyboard, BlackBerry has this tech down. Any BlackBerry clone (I had a couple before ending on BlackBerry, Nokia and Samsung).
Titan pocket exists though, gets mixed reviews I believe but overall being 'not too bad', which is different than the love BlackBerry phones tend to get.
UniHertz Titan (kind of janky, but has a good hacking community), BlackBerry Key2, fXtec Pro and a few others. There is an audience, and we're out here being weird!
Planet Computers in the UK make one inspired by the Psion 5 PDA. I have a Gemini which is still going strong, and have backed the Astro Slide which is just about to enter production:
Same here - I absolutely don't understand how major manufacturers can completely ignore this market niche.
With all existing Android users, even if just 0.1% would like to have a keyboard you would still have a business ( https://www.businessofapps.com/data/android-statistics/ - assuming that only half of those 2.8 billion android users use a mobile phone and not a tablet or something else, that would still give you a market of 140M potential customers?)
Maybe it's about patents (keyboard tech)? And/or maybe Android users are really stingy (I would pay +50$ for an integrated keyboard, maybe most would not)?
Planet computers are making them, but based on Psion PDAs rather than blackberry. I had a Gemini, but physically it wore out rather fast, and the camera was rubbish. Not sure how good their next generation is.
Depending on what you define "Blackberry like" as, the F(x)tec Pro 1 is that. Physical keyboard (slider style, though) and officially supported for LineageOS.
Yup. I could type accurately and drive at the same time (don't do that today, kids) simply because I didn't have to take my eyes off the road at all. Those little raised bumps on F and J keys helped.
The only BlackBerry I ever owned was the BlackBerry Classic, back when that was still contemporary. Best phone I ever had. The UX was very consistent between apps, everything targeting it natively tended to be quite speedy, and the keyboard was excellent.
I also miss the "BlackBerry Hub" feature, which would aggregate your emails, BlackBerry messenger messages, and SMS messages into a single UI. It even pulled in notifications from Android apps, though opening them switched to that app rather than letting you reply in-line.
I bought mine after they had already released Android compatibility for any APK you cared to load, but unfortunately I think that feature was too little, too late.
I've been on an iPhone SE since around 2016. If I had the option to go back to using the BB Classic hardware/OS as it was when I switched, but with third-party app support and security updates, I would do it without second thought.
I still want Apple to make a Hub thing inside iOS. I hate having to use 6 messaging apps to reach people I love, but as a 'data providers' I'd keep them installed.
Microsoft tried doing something like this with Windows Phone. It was OK, but the fundamental issue here is that the messaging apps themselves absolutely do not want such a thing, because it would commoditize them and keep the user away from revenue-boosting gimmicks and dark patterns. They will never allow it to be built. RIM was only able to do it before companies realized the value of messaging lock-in; even if it still existed in any real capacity today, this feature would not.
But I do wonder what a mess would result if it had collided with mass market Android and the shovelfulls of sofware that treats the notifications like a 90s systray. BBOS 10 not being Android might have been a bit of a moat against that.
This. I started with a BB Storm and stayed through several BB10 handsets up to the Passport. There was no second guessing the UX with Blackberry. The menu was always in the same place and Hub was great when you have so many accounts.
I found the UX in iPhone apps so irritating. Settings could be virtually anywhere and were commonly scattered across multiple places.
That said, I now use my iPhone very differently to how I use my Blackberry and I wonder if I would still appreciate Blackerry features if I go back.
By this I mean I get virtually no notifications. I don't have work emails on my iPhone and only the red badge icon turned on for personal email accounts. Whatsapp only fetches new messages when I open the app. The only app notification I get is from screen time every Sunday.
One of the best things about Blackberry was the subtlety of notifications but I've just chosen to go low-notification with iPhone and I don't think I'll ever revert that.
Battery life (4-5 days) and being able to have an extra battery or being able to share is what I miss most.
I also miss the customizations for alerting. I would set personal colour coded alerts on the led - that was perfect. Customization of alerts is very limited on anything else I’ve used since.
The iPhone keyboard seems to be getting worse with its auto correct. If it gets any worse (or maybe it’s me) I will get to a point of wanting the physical keyboard back.
Modern phones seem to be like a bloated MS Word with 90% of features I don’t need. All wasted.
I was recently in an area with limited cell reception. My old Blackberry would have done its job only requiring limited data using the BES. I was amazed that some iPhone apps couldn’t even login. Using the house wifi that had +500ms latency some iPhone apps failed as well. Interesting to learn how little effort is put into low bandwidth or high latency situations. Blackberry had that nailed. But they were in the wrong end of the market for cell companies.
I just turn autocorrect off. I also find that if you turn off slide to type the keyboard works better, could just be my imagination though.
There is a bit of a break-in period when I first turn off autocorrect, as I find I adapt to leaning on it pretty heavily when its on. Pretty quickly I get more accurate, and its a lot less annoying fixing my mistakes than autocorrects. YMMV.
I did the same. I wouldn't even notice that it picked the entirely wrong word until I read whatever I wrote back after the fact, usually after I sent the email. Better to just have honest typos that are still the correct word than to lose all meaning with the wrong word.
The worst was when apple rolled out autocorrect for mac OS for some update. I didn't notice it had been automatically turned on for like a month until I read something I wrote and was confused. Shut that off right away too.
Yes! The alerting customization were awesome. Things like always break thru alert for person X when in silent mode.
I also think that the smart phone market is dead as far as new features go. Sure, there will be CPU or camera spec bumps but there haven't been compelling new features in years.
No one has yet mentioned the Blackberry Priv, an Android phone with a quality keyboard sold as recently as 2016. I loved it so much, but it recently stopped holding charge among other issues, so I had to get a new Samsung. I type an order of magnitude slower now, and I write constantly. But there is no alternative. I don't know if you guys are aware, but https://www.onwardmobility.com/ is supposed to release a new Android BlackBerry phone this year, although I got tired of waiting, because from what I recall, they kept pushing back the release date.
It's amazing how there's definitely a large section of the market who would buy a phone with a decent keyboard, but there's zero interest from the companies. Instead, we get the innovation of (what are in my opinion) gimmicky clam phones with two screens.
I currently use a Blackberry KEYone, which I chose solely because of the physical keyboard. I haven't had any Blackberry before so I don't know how it compares, but there's a good chance if they keep releasing ones with a keyboard, I'll keep going for them.
One feature that I'd definitely miss without it is, on the home screen, every letter on the keyboard doubles as two configurable shortcuts (short and long press). Also the "convenience key", which I've yet to see on other phones - also configurable to anything, I set mine up so Tasker does different things depending on time/day/location.
I use the Bixby key on my Samsung as a convenience key. Using a third-party app (bxActions), I have a short press mapped to play/pause like BlackBerries had, and a long press mapped to the flashlight.
I switched to Key2 (currently on third...too many oopsies) after burning through two Priv, but I still know at least one serious Priv holdout locally (SWE wife of a EE friend) for strictly keypad reasons. The S8 did somewhat interest me due to its snap-on accessory keypad, but I couldn't get over paying a flagship pricetag and then some for a half-assed keypad that explicitly nerfs 30% of display real estate out the gate.
If OnwardMobility's eventual offering has a proper Blackberry-class keypad, it'll be an instant in for +2, and friend's wife will def be in for at least one as well.
There were other reasons too I didn't bother mentioning. The 4G network sometimes spontaneously disappeared,
and my GPS would also be extremely inconsistent, dropping out most of the time. Very weird behavior.
Not at all. I got a few of my old BlackBerry's out last year during lockdown when I had a big organise in my home office. I charged and powered a few on because nostalgia hit a bit plus I had time to kill with being in lockdown.
Using them for just a few hours I realised how bad they are. The screens were awful, navigation was horrible, the keyboard hurt the tips of my thumbs and they were slow. So so slow. I don't remember them being quite as slow so perhaps it is battery related (although they were plugged in) but it wasn't great waiting 5 seconds for an attachment to load when I am used to it being instant on my 3 year old iPhone.
I know we are spoilt now with HiDPI screens and stupidly fast mobile SoC's but they really were horrible devices looking back.
Perhaps language such as "horrible" is unfair but it is the adjective that first popped into my head to describe the experience.
Yeah I carried a BlackBerry for work and switching to an iPhone 4 was astoundingly better. I could type way faster on the iPhone because I didn’t have to push those tiny hard little keys. Tap typing was way faster and easier for me.
The trick (which I think a lot of people never learned) was to just power through everything you wanted to write, and then go back and correct. A lot of typos got corrected by the software keyboard after I moved on to the next word or two.
Sadly, Apple changed their predictive typing system from rules-based to machine learning and it got worse in some ways. Still like it better than a Blackberry…
Yes. The physical keyboard was so much faster and accurate vs the "on screen" version most phones have now.
The BB was also built like a tank. i once had mine fall off while i was running down 3 flights of granite stairs. It hit my leg on the way down and was kicked a good distance. After clearing the stairs, i put the battery back in and closed the door and it was good to go. Try that with a "modern" smart phone.
My personal favourite was the "blueberry" with the monochrome screen. Incredible battery life on that thing.
I think it was the BlackBerry 6200? they then made the same 'blueberry' but with a colour screen BlackBerry 7210 but it hurt the battery life.
I had a Blackberry Classic. The Android support was kind of garbage - but the physical keyboard was incredibly easy to type on and the trackpad was really helpful, and yes, the thing was built like a tank. I was once out running near some train tracks, had the Blackberry in one hand (I had no pockets and was probably using it for a stopwatch or a map or something), tripped on something, hands went out in front of me... and I broke my fall by slamming the Blackberry right into the steel rail. It was fine.
Removable batteries were amazing. I'm convinced they helped absorb drop shock when they'd explode out after a drop.
Blackberries with the standardized batteries were an amazing time. You could swap it out with a friend in your group during emergencies.
RIM's approach worked well when the tech wasn't there yet for a pocket-sized device to run an actual mail client. To get the "full" Blackberry experience, there was a Blackberry Enterprise Server between your device and your actual mail server.
Once we started getting devices that could run straight-up IMAP clients, the biggest appeal of the platform was compromised.
I had moments early in the glass-rectangle era when I thought I missed a physical keyboard, and I definitely had physical keyboard devices that I enjoyed on at least a hardware level through about 2009 or 2010, but the overall functionality of a modern glass-rectangle far and away exceeds what I ever got out of a RIM device.
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The blackberry felt like an extension of my brain on the internet. Touchscreen devices feel like an extension of the internet in my brain + eyes, not as nice.
I used my blackberry bold for years, then for months more after the battery swelled, until the charging port finally stopped working
If someone has a nice phone with a physical keyboard I'd seriously consider it when I replace my iPhone
First thing I do when setting up a new phone is turning off auto correct and auto capitalization. Yes, I still make mistakes, but I prefer becoming quite handy at using my backspace button than having to fight the auto correct all damn time.
- works with more languages
- can be configured to suggest completions and corrections but not auto-apply them
(If anyone from MS/SwiftKey team wonders: these days if I delete a word and start on a new it shows both the original word and the best predictions for the new word. Thankfully it only inserts the new one - but sadly it inserts two spaces.)
And since this is a startup forum, some advice if anyone else reads this:
1. don't skimp on testers. Good testers are extremely valuable.
2. give us users a way to give you feedback! You get a lot of rubbish (I know, I am a dev who sometimes work on products with easily available feedback channels) but without it feedback like this ends up on open forums like here - or we are just silent and mightily annoyed and ready to forgive quite a lot from the next app/keyboard/service that actually fixes the stupid thing your product didn't fix.
I can learn to use a consistent kb, but I can't learn a moving target
The amount of typos and reliance on auto-correct (often incorrectly correcting) proves that this the touchscreen is a somewhat cackhanded input method, even with a full qwerty keyboard on a very large screen. I’m on iPhone Max Pro, still fat-fingering the keys while typing this.
And even that doesn't change the simple fact that typing on it is cumbersome. Swiftkey is a little better on average, but still not even close to an actual keyboard.
The autocompletion is just superb and nowhere near anything I tried before. It's made for typing without looking or worrying about hitting the right keys, so if you're not really comfortable with Swiftkey-like typing, you might wanna give it a try.
"I'm a good singer"
"In a good dinner"
This precisely. I don't miss "BlackBerry the ecosystem" but I do really miss "BlackBerry the form factor".
For someone "into" keyboards (as in: taking the time to evaluate different switches to see which one I like best, for example), having to input anything on a smartphone is a really sad joke.
It might be nostalgia speaking, but I feel like I loved and enjoyed that phone more than an iPhone.
Really loved my Q10 with bb10os and my Keyone running Android! Sadly security updates stopped so had to get a slab, and run Blackberry Inbox on it (unified inbox of all your messaging apps, it is quite nice).
BlackBerry licensed Onward Mobility to make another keyboard phone, although they promised one this year, they are so silent I would be surprised if they are able to.
Bb10 was really a supernice OS, a lot of android and iOS stuff is inspired by it. blackberry still has some amazing patents and software, so it isn't a goner, but no phones directly from them anymore, only licensees (India, Indonesia, and hopefully worldwide via Onward Mobility)
I never knew the glorydays of bb07, but sure know if they stayed succesfull then (I.e. made less catastrophic mistakes and made strategic choices away from business products when they had a significant mobile phone marketshare ) how cool it might have been now with them still in the mobile phone field.
Before that a blackberry Passport which ran BBOS. Loved it too, at the time.
These devices do exist, and the niche is strong enough to support a small market segment.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/astro-slide-5g-transforme...
With all existing Android users, even if just 0.1% would like to have a keyboard you would still have a business ( https://www.businessofapps.com/data/android-statistics/ - assuming that only half of those 2.8 billion android users use a mobile phone and not a tablet or something else, that would still give you a market of 140M potential customers?)
Maybe it's about patents (keyboard tech)? And/or maybe Android users are really stingy (I would pay +50$ for an integrated keyboard, maybe most would not)?
Don't know, big mistery.
I would instantly throw away my IPhone (despite being happy with macOS/iOS) for a Blackberry like phone with LineageOS.
https://pineguild.com/pinephone-keyboard-first-impression-is...
https://ebay.com/b/BlackBerry-OS-Unlocked-Cell-Phones-Smartp...
Yup. I could type accurately and drive at the same time (don't do that today, kids) simply because I didn't have to take my eyes off the road at all. Those little raised bumps on F and J keys helped.
https://www.amazon.com/fosa-Wireless-Bluetooth-Keyboard-Port...
I also miss the "BlackBerry Hub" feature, which would aggregate your emails, BlackBerry messenger messages, and SMS messages into a single UI. It even pulled in notifications from Android apps, though opening them switched to that app rather than letting you reply in-line.
I bought mine after they had already released Android compatibility for any APK you cared to load, but unfortunately I think that feature was too little, too late.
I've been on an iPhone SE since around 2016. If I had the option to go back to using the BB Classic hardware/OS as it was when I switched, but with third-party app support and security updates, I would do it without second thought.
But I do wonder what a mess would result if it had collided with mass market Android and the shovelfulls of sofware that treats the notifications like a 90s systray. BBOS 10 not being Android might have been a bit of a moat against that.
I found the UX in iPhone apps so irritating. Settings could be virtually anywhere and were commonly scattered across multiple places.
That said, I now use my iPhone very differently to how I use my Blackberry and I wonder if I would still appreciate Blackerry features if I go back.
By this I mean I get virtually no notifications. I don't have work emails on my iPhone and only the red badge icon turned on for personal email accounts. Whatsapp only fetches new messages when I open the app. The only app notification I get is from screen time every Sunday.
One of the best things about Blackberry was the subtlety of notifications but I've just chosen to go low-notification with iPhone and I don't think I'll ever revert that.
I also miss the customizations for alerting. I would set personal colour coded alerts on the led - that was perfect. Customization of alerts is very limited on anything else I’ve used since.
The iPhone keyboard seems to be getting worse with its auto correct. If it gets any worse (or maybe it’s me) I will get to a point of wanting the physical keyboard back.
Modern phones seem to be like a bloated MS Word with 90% of features I don’t need. All wasted.
I was recently in an area with limited cell reception. My old Blackberry would have done its job only requiring limited data using the BES. I was amazed that some iPhone apps couldn’t even login. Using the house wifi that had +500ms latency some iPhone apps failed as well. Interesting to learn how little effort is put into low bandwidth or high latency situations. Blackberry had that nailed. But they were in the wrong end of the market for cell companies.
Regarding LED color, there are random apps for Android that let you play with the LED color on _some_ phones, like *goes digging in menu* this one: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.coolbeans....
Looks like the important bit is Notification.Builder->setLights, now NotificationChannel.Builder->setLights:
- NotificationCompat: https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/core/app/No...
- Notification: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notifica... ("deprecated in API 26: use NotificationChannel")
- NotificationChannel: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/Notifica...
There is a bit of a break-in period when I first turn off autocorrect, as I find I adapt to leaning on it pretty heavily when its on. Pretty quickly I get more accurate, and its a lot less annoying fixing my mistakes than autocorrects. YMMV.
The worst was when apple rolled out autocorrect for mac OS for some update. I didn't notice it had been automatically turned on for like a month until I read something I wrote and was confused. Shut that off right away too.
I also think that the smart phone market is dead as far as new features go. Sure, there will be CPU or camera spec bumps but there haven't been compelling new features in years.
It's amazing how there's definitely a large section of the market who would buy a phone with a decent keyboard, but there's zero interest from the companies. Instead, we get the innovation of (what are in my opinion) gimmicky clam phones with two screens.
One feature that I'd definitely miss without it is, on the home screen, every letter on the keyboard doubles as two configurable shortcuts (short and long press). Also the "convenience key", which I've yet to see on other phones - also configurable to anything, I set mine up so Tasker does different things depending on time/day/location.
There is also a hidden API permission you can grant using ADB that allows for long-pressing the volume buttons to skip tracks. I use this APK for that: https://github.com/Incineroar/skipTrackLongPressVolume
If OnwardMobility's eventual offering has a proper Blackberry-class keypad, it'll be an instant in for +2, and friend's wife will def be in for at least one as well.
Deleted Comment
Using them for just a few hours I realised how bad they are. The screens were awful, navigation was horrible, the keyboard hurt the tips of my thumbs and they were slow. So so slow. I don't remember them being quite as slow so perhaps it is battery related (although they were plugged in) but it wasn't great waiting 5 seconds for an attachment to load when I am used to it being instant on my 3 year old iPhone.
I know we are spoilt now with HiDPI screens and stupidly fast mobile SoC's but they really were horrible devices looking back.
Perhaps language such as "horrible" is unfair but it is the adjective that first popped into my head to describe the experience.
The trick (which I think a lot of people never learned) was to just power through everything you wanted to write, and then go back and correct. A lot of typos got corrected by the software keyboard after I moved on to the next word or two.
Sadly, Apple changed their predictive typing system from rules-based to machine learning and it got worse in some ways. Still like it better than a Blackberry…
The primary interaction on the Blackberry was the scrollwheel on the side and every action felt like scrolling through contextual menus endlessly.
The BB was also built like a tank. i once had mine fall off while i was running down 3 flights of granite stairs. It hit my leg on the way down and was kicked a good distance. After clearing the stairs, i put the battery back in and closed the door and it was good to go. Try that with a "modern" smart phone.
My personal favourite was the "blueberry" with the monochrome screen. Incredible battery life on that thing.
I think it was the BlackBerry 6200? they then made the same 'blueberry' but with a colour screen BlackBerry 7210 but it hurt the battery life.
RIM's approach worked well when the tech wasn't there yet for a pocket-sized device to run an actual mail client. To get the "full" Blackberry experience, there was a Blackberry Enterprise Server between your device and your actual mail server.
Once we started getting devices that could run straight-up IMAP clients, the biggest appeal of the platform was compromised.
I had moments early in the glass-rectangle era when I thought I missed a physical keyboard, and I definitely had physical keyboard devices that I enjoyed on at least a hardware level through about 2009 or 2010, but the overall functionality of a modern glass-rectangle far and away exceeds what I ever got out of a RIM device.