I'm a BB user, but not through choice

Work supply us minions with a BB Curve, and i find it to be the most horrible, clunky, and outdated pile of junk on the planet. I only use it for reading emails, and making and receving calls, as it's useless at anything else . Thankfully i have a "real" smartphone of my own that i can do more advanced things on...like texting. Even just using it as a phone comes with mega frustrations.

Need to enter a contact into the phone book? ok, type the number in, press menu.....look for option to save number. nope, it isnt there. So then you have to press green, dial the number, and end the call. Then press green again to go to call history, highlight the number, press menu and then "add to contacts" from there.

Internet - hah...on that screen? good luck with that.

When BB's first hit the market, there was nothing else around that could provide business email like they did, and i'll admit, they were impressive. This was in an era where a lot of businesses were still running Exchange 2000, so no mobile support whatsoever, other than pop3/imap (yuck)

Then Exchange 2003 came along, with Outlook Mobile Access. You didnt need a blackberry/BES/£15 a month EXTRA on your mobile contract anymore to get push email. Fair enough, Windows Mobile 6 was garbage looking back, but the devices were much better than Blackberrys of that period, with nicer screens, storage capacity, and a better UI (Laggy as hell at times, but still fairly usable)

Blackberry carried on as they were.....basic, clunky handsets, with all the great features you'd expect from a 5 year old Nokia Symbian handset, and requiring businesses to buy a BES CAL per handset.

Then Exchange 2007/2010 came along, followed by Android/iOS and really ruined their party. Encrypted push email, on a range of devices that can be centrally managed as part of a Groupware system they've already paid for, without a requirement for per device licensing and a seperate BES application server? That sounds much better. And whats that, the user enters their email address and password and they configure themselves, without having to get the admin to create a BES user, wait 4 hours while it initialises, then spend another hour trying to get the handset to activate? WOW!

What have Blackberry done? Nothing. Still the same tired old BES (now with web UI) and substandard handsets, though now you don't need to licence it per device, and most companies get away with BES Express without the need for the BES Enterprise data plans on their devices. Big whoop. New versions of their OS just seem to be the same horrible UI with a new skin on. I had a "Torch" briefly, WTF is with the touch screen. I think they borrowed it from an iPaq circa 2002, you need to mash your entire face against it to make it do anything.

Go buy a £60 Android from Tesco and connect it to your exchange server, you'll get a better experience from a user side, traffic is encrypted and you can still remote wipe the thing when a user leaves it in the pub.

Bye bye Blackberry, you won't be missed