The Razr I’ve had for about five years now finally gave out. The thing couldn’t send out text messages properly, and placing a call would just force the phone to reboot itself time and time again. I got pretty pissed off at the thing, and so I finally decided to give it up. I wanted a smartphone of any kid, so long as it wasn’t a PalmOS based handheld or something in windows mobile (hee, windows mobile. the thought of its memory manager still gives me the shivers. Who the fuck thought that was a good idea, anyways?). So my options were… quite limited. If there was an Android based handheld on Verizon Wireless’ plan, I would be getting that phone in a second. All the crazy cool things Android has begun to do really interests me (The newer incarnation of the Android OS is fascinating me), but it’s Verizon, after all- the choices are either smartphones or Verizon OS based phones with small keyboards. So I went with the next best thing. I gotz me a blackberry! 
The Blackberry Curve, to be exact. I had heard too many horror stories with the Storm to even have me consider it- a neighbor had switched to it and had more than one problem with it, goiing through two or three Storms before he gave it up for something else. So I just went for the next best thing on the Verizon service plan it doesn’t cost too much more than I was paying for already, and thanks to a sale, i only paid about $120 bucks for it. (Deus ex machina says I’ll be finding the phone dropping in price after i type this, but I don’t mind at this point, I have it, why regret the purchase?)
The sister and I went together to get the same phone (she later decided to get a pink one, to separate the two. At one point, the service rep almost activated the pink phone on my account) One of the sales reps at the Verizon store tried to get me to move up to the Storm, but i wouldn’t budge, sharing a look of “ooooh heelllll noooo” between myself and my sibling. He later gave me a dirty look when I snorted when he asked me about singing up for the Verizon Hub thing. Who needs it, really? So yeah, I’m about two/three weeks into using this phone, and I’m fucking loving it. I switched the domain name for teammayhem.net over to be used to Gmail, so I’m able to use a lot of the gmail apps on the phone. IMAP support is incredible on the application, and I’m really liking the OS overall. The syncing program for the Blackberry to sync with my mac is a crashy bitch, so I decided to sync everything to my google account. My address book is on google, and both my mac and my blackberry sync to it, so all is well. Next step is to fix up the calendar to sync properly, but that’s going to be a bitch and a half to try and figure out. Maybe for when I have more time, or a lead I could follow. The apps I use on a regular basis are:
AIM- I talk to a bunch of my friends on AIM still, and having it on the go is great. It’s fun to be talking to a friend and having them slowly realize 20 minutes into the conversation that I’m actually at the supermarket shopping for beer (Hi Katja!).
MSN Messanger- Again, it’s for conversation, but Levi just spams me with it and sends insults. Lovely times.
TwitterBerry- I love me my Twitter, and this just an extension of that addiction. Works well, have yet to try the TwitPic support.
Opera- The standard browser on the Blackberry is great (and I still use it from time to time) but to view full pages, I switch over to the Opera browser. It’s a full fleged browser on the blackberry, rendering pages at a decent clip to make certain sites easy to read.
Pandora- Pandora on this phone is terrific, just plug it in to my stereo and pick a random band to listen to as i drive. SO good. The only big gripes I’ve had are the lack of apps on the device. I’ve got my standard set of apps I use all the time, but naturally, there isn’t that variety, that pizazz of titles that can be found on the iPhone, hell, even on the Android system. With the creation of the “Blackberry App World” earlier this month, it’s a start for some great opportunities on the handset, but the pickin’s are slim so far. I’ll probably talk about this thing more once i have more time to send it through stress tests, but it’s a step up from the Rzr.