A BlackBerry user's trip to Windows Mobile & back..

About 10 days ago my 8830 met it's maker. Broken beyond repair :( I headed over to Verizon to pickup a replacement and the shiny new Motorola Q9M caught my eye. That and the fact that I could save $100 over a new 8830.

So.. I bought the Q9M. Nice looking piece of hardware but at the end of the day, I need something fast and reliable. My observations:

• I really miss the BB's red "Message/alert light". (funny how we need the "little things")
• I really miss the idea of the Blackberry case. Where it turns off/changes profiles when in the case and is on when removed from the case. I would have thought WM would have caught onto this by now?:confused:
• Battery life is about 50% of the BB8830. (maybe because of the case issue?)
• WM6 gets extremely sluggish and I need to kill apps with the "task manager" to speed things up.
• Why can the BB sync Outlook notes wirelessly to exchange out of the box and the Q cannot?
• Smartcaps... huge missing feature. I do like the WM6 "auto complete",but omission of the smart caps feature is really poor. (and a single "shift key" on the right side of the keyboard??)
• No copy/paste :confused:
• I had issues with the keyboard backlight not coming on. Somewhat random at times (others report the same)
• BB e-mail arrives significantly faster than the Q's ActiveSync.
• No option to delete from handheld and leave on server?
• Bluetooth works well with easy setup, but I miss the capability to only send one category of contacts. Scrolling through 500+ contacts on BMW's screen is no fun and a waste of time.
• You cannot reassign the side button. (Very minor feature, but something I missed)
• Volume control uses the side "wheel" which is cumbersome. No dedicated buttons.
  
  The Q9M's advantages:
• Camera, though I used it just a couple of times. One issue is that the camera seems to take 4-5 seconds to startup.
• The Q had a nice setup wizard that made it real easy to add my .Mac IMAP account. (We're outsourced with TheMessageCenter, how would I do that with the 8830?)

I tried the media player a few times and it was extremely slow compared to the BB media player. It's not a requirement anyhow, but I was really disappointed. Maybe it's the OS that's holding it back? Having used WM a few years ago, I would have thought it would have evolved a bit more over the years. While it offers a pretty interface, under the hood there is not much there. "Lipstick on a pig" comes to mind ;)

At the end of the day, I'm BB user. It's just like my Mac at home.. "it simply works". May not have all the fancy features, but it does exactly what it was designed to do with very little fuss. The camera is the only thing I'll miss, but l would imagine that Verizon will get a phone with full QWERTY and a camera sometime next year.

I'm returning the Q today and will pickup another BB8830 this afternoon.

I pay the monthly fee for the insurance from VZW... I think it's something like $6. Even tho that's $72 a year, it's relatively cheap insurance.

I've had to use it twice, once when I lost my phone and another time when I dropped it. In both cases, the phone replacement was an upgraded model, since the original model was no longer available.

The only down side is the $25 deductible for the new phone. But since I got a new/upgrade phone, I didn't complain. In neither case was the phone a BB or other smartphone.

FWIW.