[djeaux]

First post!

My first experience with BBs was a 7290 that was inflicted on me by my job. As an email device, it was okay, but the form factor utterly stank as a phone -- the width of the thing was too big for my hand, and after about 3 minutes in a call I had a bad case of chirospasm (go look it up). Added to that the fact that my employer was a state agency, which made my calls a matter of public record, and I ended up carrying a little Motorola flip phone for personal use. Due to those factors, I grew to hate the Blackberry and to love the flip phone.

I retired a year ago and happily wiped the BB and gave it back. Fast forward a year, and I'm teaching a bunch of online classes as an adjunct and desperately need email "anywhere." I checked out a friend's Pearl and was really put off by the SureType, but I decided to give the Pearl Flip a try. (Like I said, I really like flip phones.) After about an hour of utter frustration, I switched to MultiTap and it works great.

I'd say SureType is great for folks who (a) can't spell anyway and (b) cut their teeth using predictive text systems on SMS, but MultiTap gets the Pearl Flip keyboard pretty close to a regular QWERTY set up. As with anything else, YMMV of course!