So, as I tweeted earlier, my 4th (fourth) Blackberry Bold 9000 showed it's bad manners and tried to die on my hands. Including used BBs which I got from Craigslist it's 5th, but who counts. In some way every of BBs which I tried gave me a hard time. As much as iPhone gets on my nerves with it's own bugs, it's not even close. I crawled through CrackBerry forum and found that I am not alone! At least few other posts stating that people had at least 1 to 3 exchanges of their Blackberry's due to some malfunction within a year of their life. It gives a lot of information to think that RIM's biggest problem with competition against iPhone and Android is not "applications", or "interface", or whatever else, but the most important thing - reliability. When the phone is a piece of crap - it's not reliable. Even if it has great email, keyboard, many other features - nobody gives a damn. Why would I want to exchange my phone ever so often? Don't know. I've been using iPhone 2G since it was released couple years ago. It's not perfect, slow, does not work as good as "phone" has to work, "bubblish", etc. - but I never got any reliability problem. Yeah, batter ran off. Who cares, we all knew it sucks with battery life. But no sudden reboots, no freezing (which gives the only option to pull of the battery!), no lost icons on restart (requiring one more restart to get them back)... That's not fun, I am telling you.
I wish all the best RIM to figuring out their priorities, but I am stopping my experiments in finding good version of Blackberry Bold 9000 which can live for my needs. Back to iPhone 3GS, and I am going to curse it for being what it is, and only hope Apple fixes it fast with their updates, but at least I know I have some piece of phone working for me. If I would look into Blackberry field again, I would try to research as much as possible about reliability of those phones and exact models I'll be looking into; and probably I would value Android's creatures for now much more than Blackberry. At least, what I want to see anxiously is Verizon's Droid, as I heard a lot of great reviews about it. It will be released tomorrow, as rumors are saying, so probably I'll be able to check it out at Verizon store too.