We used to be Alltel customers, and had Blackberry 8330's. They were good phones, reliable with the exception of the track ball, which is a really poor anti-feature in any environment where you might not have hands that are pure as the driven snow. In other words, if you actually work for a living, the Blackberry track ball is a POS. You can pop them out and clean them, but it is a fiddly little process and I got tired of finding magnifying glasses or my Optivisor to do it, then setting up a nice clean level spot, etc.

The Blackberry had good s/w and h/w reliability after we got past the trackball issue. The software never sync'ed the address book correctly with a desktop tho, and it is quite clear that Rimm doesn't give a rat's rear end about individual users in the back-end s/w regard. They're focused on "enterprise" accounts, and as such, the BB is a great corporate smartphone.

As a  result of Alltel being sucked into AT&T here in Wyoming, we went down to Verizon and got two Droid X's. After about eight weeks, we like the phones OK, but have the same issues with the Swype/touchscreen typing. The battery usage IS horrible if you have all the features enabled and tasks running in the background (eg, market/news/wx applications). To get two days of usage out of the Droid X, we run them with WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth all disabled. Turning on any one of these halves the battery life. Turning on all of them means that the battery won't last for one of my 18 hour days.

My beef with the touchscreen phone idea is the battery life. All the features are nice, but the battery simply has to last at least 24 hours, with 30 minutes of talk time, or the features don't mean anything to me. Charging the phone in the middle of the day simply isn't an option.

The other thing about the Droid X is how slow the camera is. A guy might as well be using a pinhole camera as use a Droid, it is so slow. Nice resolution when it finally does take a picture, but the delay from pressing the shutter widget to when it actually takes the photo is abysmally long.