I had a Curve (colour, no 3G), it was amazing having access to email in my pocket. However Blackberry's problem in my book was they marketed it at Corporate IT

I had a Curve (colour, no 3G), it was amazing having access to email in my pocket. However Blackberry's problem in my book was they marketed it at Corporate IT, and corporate IT is universally shit, I assume my (dinosaur) company had standard policies - which meant massively locked down, you couldn't install any apps, so there was no way an "app store" would have succeeded selling things like angry birds. This left space for those with power in the organisations to get an iphone, enjoy playing silly games, see the potential of all the other apps, and then order IT to make email work on their phones so they didn't have to carry a blackberry around.