So, a couple months back i got a Blackberry Tour with Verizon. Back then it was the newest Blackberry, so i was feeling pretty good about it. That didn’t last very long…

Lets start out with the good things about it:

  • The sound quality is great
  • I rarely get a dropped call
  • The keyboard is good, not too cramped, but not too spread out or anything
  • There are a bunch of apps available  for it and the home screen is very customizable
  • Beautiful screen, displays colors phenomenally
  • Decent battery life if you’re not constantly on the internet (like my brother, haha)
  • 3.2 mega-pixel camera, which at the time was the best you could get, and is still very good
  • Takes very good quality video
  • Good user interface

And now, the bad:

  • The damn thing freezes all the time. I know it’s not just mine, because my brother has the same phone and his does it too, maybe even more than mine!
  • Although there’s a decent amount of apps, the very VERY few that are free from the blackberry app world pretty much suck. If you want any decent apps, you have to pay for them, unlike with an iPhone or and Android, which both have many many many free apps to choose from.
  • This phone is ridiiiculously slow if you have even a moderate amount of apps on it, and you constantly have to reboot it so you can free up the memory.
  • THAT’S ANOTHER THING! Rebooting takes SO LONG. Every time you pull the battery, it takes about five or ten minutes before the damn thing can be used again. It’s ridiculous!
  • If you don’t like the theme, good luck finding a new one that you don’t have to pay for. I fiiinally found one that i liked after spending about an hour sifting through all the free ones (btw there are some really terrible ones there, some people just don’t know how to program)
  • The browser, although decent, is ridiculously slow. Sometimes it even stops working entirely and you have to turn the phone off and back on, or even reboot it sometimes O_O
  • If you want threaded text messaging organized by contact, you have to download a third-party messaging app. I found one that costs a dollar, but still, if RIM was smart, theyd’ve just made it standard to have threaded messaging organized by sender (although i hear that’s coming on the blackberry 5.0 os, so keep your fingers crossed if you’ve already got a blackberry)
  • Random, but when you’re listening to music, and you want to change the volume, you have make sure you only press the volume up or down button for a split second. If you hold it down too long, it changes the track you’re listening to. Although that is also a plus, because you can change songs and volume while the phone is still locked, so if you keep it in your pocket, you don’t have to worry about anything more than changing the song or volume, instead of pocket-dialing someone or something.
  • Ah, we’ve come to the thing i hate the most…the trackball. Possibly the worst idea on the planet…honestly, i’d rather have little arrow keys and a teeny button i had to press with my pinky, than have the stupid trackball. I hate everything about the stupid trackball. When i first got the phone the trackball worked great. Boy did that not last…the stupid trackball gets so freaking dirty even with just normal use. After about two weeks, it gets so sticky that, hen you want to scroll through your home screen or one of your folders, the damn thing sticks like it’s trying to roll through peanut butter. You have to up the sensitivity to around 90 to be able to scroll at a decent rate, and then if you do that, its impossible to be precise with the little demon. You can try scrolling left about five times and it won’t move a millimeter, but when it finally does move, you completely overshoot where you were trying to get, so you have to put the apps you use most in the corners so you don’t have an aneurysm trying to get to them. Oh, and when you finally do get to the app you want to select, when you click down on the ball, half the time it will slip and select the app right next to it. I can’t count how many times I’ve wanted to select my messages, and then i open up my browser, so then i have to close it and try again, usually twice because it tends to happen multiple times when it does happen. I’ve been looking into replacing it with an optical track-pad, but I’ve had no luck, so anyone out there who knows any way of doing that, please tell me, i will love you forever.