About a year and a half ago, I needed a new cell provider. I was not happy with MTS as my provider, as I was travelling out of Manitoba for work and conferences, and MTS is not a national provider and therefore charged me extra in roaming charges. For those of us who want a national plan, our choices (of a major provider) are Rogers and Telus. Having used Rogers at work, and heard some horror stories there, I chose Telus. It had its bonuses (cheaper plans) and negatives (no SIM card to just move to a new device), but I chose it anyway.

When I signed up, I picked up the HTC Diamond Touch. I originally wanted a BlackBerry Curve, but they had none, and without something I would have had no phone. So I went for the Diamond, for a few reasons:

1) It looked kinda cool. To go along with that, it had a lot of the applications and features I wanted built in.

2) It was a Windows Mobile technology. I use BB at work all the time, so having a Windows-based platform to play around on and program with was kinda cool.

3) The touchscreen capability. I actually do prefer a touchscreen to actual keyboard, but that’s just preference not a make-or-break.

In that year and a half, I have replaced the battery twice (the battery life sucks), had major problems with the touchscreen becoming unresponsive, and basically the Windows Mobile equivalent to BSOD on virtually every application (including the phone, which I really don’t see how that is even possible).

So today, I ventured back to my Telus store and bought a new phone: the BB Curve 8330 which is what I wanted to get a year and a bit ago. I am still setting up and configuring (doing the OS updates now) and will get the BB App Store installed soon (Step 10 of 11 in the update process is up to 30 mins long), and will then be back on my way to smartphone goodness.

One thing i was not expecting was to have to create the link to my email account on my PC; I couldn’t do it on the BB. The manual said I could (Internet Email or Exchange) but the BB only gave me the option for Exchange or skip. I chose skip, but that’s ok; I still got it working. Kinda frsutrating though. At any rate… here goes the BB venture.