The BlackBerry USB port was never designed for day to day use.
Charging was done via a cradle. There are two gold contacts on the back of the Curve and the Pearl. They fit a cradle like this

which charges the phone without using the flimsy USB port. I got mine on ebay but you can find them here in the CrackBerry Store.
Since most BlackBerrys are corporate devices, they get all their syncing OTA so that just leaves the USB port for maintainence use.
BES users will even get OS upgrades OTA under OS 4.5.
IMO there should be one of these cradles in with every Blackberry phone.
If you need a reapir on your Blackberry then try these gys
BlackBerry Repair Shop - A full line of RIM BlackBerry repair services and BlackBerry parts for all BlackBerry handheld devices I sent my phone there and they fixed it in 24 hours. There is a thread that I wrote about it in here someplace. Do a search on my name and BBRepair Shop.