I had a Blackberry Pearl candybar back in the day, and it remains one of my favorite phones ever. The half-qwerty thing was fantastic, and the little trackball

I had a Blackberry Pearl candybar back in the day, and it remains one of my favorite phones ever. The half-qwerty thing was fantastic, and the little trackball was nice too. The magnetic case was super cool. I could type way faster on it than I've ever been able to do on any soft keyboard. The full multicolor notification LED was cool too. When that phone was current, it was easily at feature parity with anything else on the market (except maybe in screen size). Everything about it was just as polished as hell. I always thought it was a shame that Blackberry could never really figure out how to keep their lead. Apple and Google ate their lunch bigtime. I think where Apple really beat Blackberry was iTunes and the web-browser. Back in the iPhone classic days, it didn't have any kind of app-store or anything. But the web-browser and iTunes were big draws onto the platform. And once iOS had enough users to support an app-store ecosystem, it was all over for Blackberry. Google came along for the ride too of course, but IMO Android wouldn't be where it is if Apple hadn't figured out how to market smartphones. Of course - the last real nail in Blackberry's coffin was Outlook support on iOS and Android. That basically broke Blackberry's stranglehold on corporate devices, and it turned out that the platform wasn't strong enough to stand without that. Also it was stupid as hell that Blackberry forced its users onto specialized phone plans with a Blackberry addon feature.