I, for example, enjoyed the wheel. Scroll wheel to email you want to read, press wheel to open, scroll to read. To be honest I don't remember how I close email, click wheel again or another button, but the whole experience can be done with one hand/thumb easily, while holding coffee in another hand. Try that with iPhone.

Keyboard. Touch sucks for writing.

I can type so much faster with Swype-style typing. I completely don't understand the die-hard keyboardists

My issue with Swype-style - after having used it for about 8 years before switching to a phone with a keyboard (Android Blackberry) - is that having to wait for each word to confirm it got the right one is where the slowdown is. Touch-typing means I can keep going without confirming, because when I do mis-type, I can feel that my finger wasn't positioned correctly without having to do any visual confirmation.

Based on reactions from co-workers though, it seems I'm much more efficient at touch-typing than most of them, even on a fullsize keyboard. And the experience does translate to a physical phone keyboard, even at the smaller size, so that may well be where some of the disconnect is.

Note also when touch-typing on my phone, I get the full speed by using both thumbs, not just one.

I could touch type on blackberry far faster and more accurate than swype. Swype is better than nothing but it's not as good as the bb keyboard was.

I’ve never had any trouble with typing on a touch screen just as fast as my old Blackberry. Especially if you have autocorrect.

Autocorrect is more often slowing me down. It's only rarely correct.

Yep. Autocorrect's one of the first things I turn off on any device. I'd rather have a misspelled word than an entirely wrong word.

Case in point: people spelling "definitely" as (I assume) "definately" only to be autocorrected to "defiantly" without noticing. That sort of "correction" completely changes the meaning of a sentence.

This does not compute. I am a fast typer on all mediums, but a touch screen is just so slow compared to physical. I think I got around 80 wpm on my blackberry, there is no way I could do that on a touch screen. And iPhone autocorrect is terrible with any sort of tech jargon - frequently causing manual corrections.

it is just a habit. Here is a video from 2010 with 97 wpm on iPhone - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNcTE5WJGdw

I've found that haptic feedback helps. My first smartphone was a handmedown first-gen iPhone, so I didn't really understand the point of haptic feedback because I wasn't exposed to it, but upon switching to a Galaxy SII and feeling a tactile response with each press I've yet to look back.

Every time haptic feedback turns off for "power saving" when I'm running low on battery, I immediately wonder how anyone ever manages to type anything at all without mucking things up all the time.

I'd still prefer a physical keyboard, though.

For me and for a number of email "power users" whom I know, Blackberry strictly dominates iPhone email experience.

Stipulated, it definitely depends on personal preferences and workflows as to what you personally prefer.

But it is pretty incontrovertible that Blackberry was a finely-honed email tool with departures from that core use case being pretty tightly defined around the things you do ancillary to email (setting appointments, reading attachments, etc.).

iPhone is worse at that particular thing -- but vastly more capable broadly speaking for a universe of other things.

I'm still pretty confused about what blackberry did well. It sounds like they had a workflow that people that liked it liked.

Other than that, what specifically did it enable that the other phones didn't?

BlackBerry couldn’t read many attachments let alone edit them. Modern smart phones can run a decent version of MS Office.

The BlackBerry Email client definitely didn’t have a method of integrating third party storage providers like Dropbox which was definitely a thing by 2011.

Search. I could instantly search basically my entire inbox in 2005. That was the power of BES. I still can't do that today on Android or iOS. If I'm looking for an email from 6 months ago or last year it takes FOREVER to find.

I just did a search for a keyword from mail that I knew would be old - 2005. It found it instantly.