[pmjohnson99]

So after a couple of rousing games on kickball on Saturday I reached for my Curve in my pocket and to my horror my Berry was covered in dirt from the ball field. Those of you who play sports know that this isn't normal dirt, but actually granulated stuff that has some pretty hard solids in it. I began to shake it out and most of the particles were coming out. One pebble did wedge itself into the earphone jack. Also the trackball was barely working. "Well," I thought, "time to break out my Torx set and get this thing clean".

The phrase "things went downhill from there" comes to mind here. I got the phone apart easy enough and I managed to pop out the trackball no problem. After that my Sunday was just me cursing as my dog lay asleep beside me wondering what was so important as to keep him from the park.

With the phone finally reasembled my last hurtle was getting the trackball back together. though I was armed with what I thought to be pretty good instructions (found on Crackberry.com of course) I couldn't get that metal retaining ring to bring the whole assembly together. It's one of those parts that can't be worked too much because they get out of shape too easily and then its hopeless. I then went to the Superglue. I find that when you resort to adhesives its pretty much all over for your repair, but I'll try anything once. Like I predicted that really didn't help me I got it back together and into the phone, but something went wrong to the point that rolling up sent the cursur right and rolling right sent the cursur up. Because of the glueing I was unable to take the trackball assembly apart and switch those little magnetic wheels around. So thus I scrambled to the internet and hopefully by Wed. or Thu. I will have a brandnew trackball.

Now I know you are probably wondering how an iPhone plays into this and how does this make a Berry better than. Considering and iPhone doesn't really have any moving parts and there aren't a lot of places for dirt to get in you are pretty safe from this predicament.

Here's the thing even though I don't have a trackball; my Curve is still pretty useable. I won't be playing brickbreaker and time soon, or even opening some programs, but I can still check emails, open the browser, and even change the profile without a trackball. It takes a little getting use to and you are limited on some stuff, but it's still pretty functional.

If this was an iPhone with, say, a bad touchscreen you would be screwed. There wouldn't be much you could do with it. I haven't used an iPhone yet, but I don't even think you can pick up a call without the touchscreen.

Now I know you don't engineer things with the idea that anything will fail, but it's nice to know, when a device is built, if one of the main input tools breaks you can still use the thing with some functionality.

Score one for the Berry!

[Technofan7]

No doubt about that. BB 4ever =)

[rameal999]

I guess so... Also the battery convenience you can change batteries in a BB in 2 seconds I don't know about the iphone maybe 2 days or 2 weeks if you have to send it in

Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com

[sumo89]

plus with the iphone you have to use a paperclip to get the sim card out.

[TumTum]

Agreed, though I think they could really put some work into making the trackball for reliable. Mine was messed up a while back so that the sensitivity for the thing was through the roof! Luckily I got them to fix it for me, but I think they could make some improvements on it!

[jenaywins]

Add this to the list of BB VS iPhone Threads I Am Sick Of....