It's only a matter of days now before I shift over from my beloved Blackberry Curve 8900 to iphone4 and I thought it might be interesting to blog about what I (think) I'll miss and what I (think) the problems may be.

So, what will I miss?

1. The Blackberry keyboard. It's superb - and after owning Blackberry's for a couple of years I can rattle through emails etc. This blog post for instance - a piece of cake with this responsive (yet diminutive) keyboard. The next logical 'upgrade' to the Curve is the Torch and the keyboard just didn't feel as nice. Also, I suspect that the days of the keyb oard being the default input device may be numbered - not yet - but it's on the horizon so I may as well get used to life without a real one.
2. Reliability. A pretty strong o/s with very few crashes etc. I have had a few minor wobbles but, in fairness re installing the o/s is a breeze.
3. Ruggedness - survives drops etc. It's taken a bashing and has always lived to tell the tale.

In short it's been a cracking business/email/twitter phone.

So, why am I changing?

In a word: 'apps'. The breadth and quality of the apps just pails when compared to the iphone. I use many online web applications such as Freshbooks, Highrise, Basecamp etc and they all have pretty solid iphone apps which will help my 'on the move' productivity.

Another reason is the web browser; quite frankly the Blackberry one is shocking - it's like browsing in the dark ages. It's really a limiting experience.

My concerns with the iphone are:

1. Reliability - I can't have it crashing all the time and I don't want to allocate 1/2 a day a week to visit the nearest Apple store to breath life into a dead brick. Also, the actual telephone bit needs to work without me standing on my head!
2. Ruggedness - my phone is always with me and takes a bashing - obviously I'll try to be careful but it will need to be able to keep up with me.
3. Battery life - heard conflicting reports here - I need a good couple of hours life out of it!
4. Not sure about this one but the Blackberry is REALLY good at running apps in the background - this is something that the iphone supposedly is not good at. However, plenty of people happily use email/twitter on their iphone so I'm sure I'll survive.

So - that's about that really! I look forward to blogging about how these expectations turned out in reality.

Ps if you're wondering why I didn't consider going the Android route, I did. It's just the apps again - yeah you've got good apps on Android but I wanted to treat myself! Saying that, if Android carries on the way it is, I'm pretty sure I'll have a phone with that o/s at some point.