... and it is all so obvious to me now ...

Yeah. 1 day with a Blackberry 8830. One day. Thats all I needed. I am sold. Best phone/device I have used. The Nokia E61 was close, but it didn’t work in the US on a 3G network. Palm Treo was good, but had too many issues. The windows hand helds are, well, not quite there. Windows mobile 6 is a huge improvement of windows mobile 5. That said, WM6 is IMO significantly behind BlackBerry on usability and performance. WM5 is a very bad joke. Both reminded me of windows. On a small device. Which is not a good thing. Your phone “crashing” should be something met with a surprised look, not “oh not again”.

I like the interface. It is simple. Spartan. No fancy bells and whistles. It just works. Thats all I want in a phone. I want it to just work. The email just works. The browser just works. Using it is simple. It just works. Downsides are that removing the battery is hard. Well, maybe that is not a downside. I dunno. No camera, and you know, I used that, what, like once every few months? Kudos to RIM. Did I mention, it just works?