You don't mention if phone type (CDMA vs GSM / GPRS) is an issue. Anyhow, my $0.02 ...
I use the Kyocera 7135 from Bell. I quite like the functionality, but the size (weight) is a little more that I'd like and the battery life quite frankly sucks. But as long as I'm wearing a suit or at least a jacket the phone fits nicely in a pocket. And if I just recharge every day the battery lasts long enough. The colour screen is very readable, and the phone part of the unit works adequately well.
If I had a choice I'd switch to the Treo600 which currently only works on the GSM / SPRS (Rogers) network. That phone is much smaller than my Kyocera and has the keyboard built in which I find a good idea. I'm quite happy scribbling in Graffiti, but the keyboard has it's advantages.
I recently tested both the Blackberry & the Blueberry. While the Blackberry felt awkward handling as a phone, it was actually a pretty good unit. I'll stress that I was testing the RIM devices in an enterprise setting - that means we had the Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) running behind our corporate firewall which gave me seamless access to my work email. I imagine the experience is similar if you don't have a BES but I'm not sure.
The Blackberry had very good battery life and email was a breeze on it. I quickly became addicted to the unit, though I generally fall in love with technology quite easily. (Hmm ... kinda like seeing a beautiful lady ...) We were able to use the built-in web browser to connet to our internal intranet and go out to the internet as well. The experience was slow, but usable. The biggest drawback to surfing was predictably screen size - as large as they are, websites designed for 800x600 resolution or greater just don't size properly on a 200-ishx100-ish size screen.
The Blueberry with it's smaller size was appealing as holding it to your head as a phone was easier. The Blackberry sometimes felt like holding a side plate to your head by comparison. The colour screen on the Blueberry was nice, but for general reading of emails etc I preferred the contrast of black & white. The screen on the Blueberry is also smaller, but the images are not proportional - rather the come out squished. So even reading emails was an odd experience on that screen size. Since my RIM testing, Rogers & Bell have both released the Blackberry with colour screen. I should be getting my test unit any time now.
Both the Blackberry & Blueberry had excellent battery life. And the integration with our Outlook Exchange server (via BES) was outstanding. There was absolutely no difference in using the RIM vs Outlook Web Access vs laptop in the office connected to the network. Both email and calendar came through seamlessly - this is the true power of RIM.
If you want an email solution, you won't do better than RIM particularly in a corporate environment. At a personal level such as accessing your Sympatico email or whatever it is you use, I would think that RIM still comes out ahead for email access.
On the other hand if you want the install your own little apps, you really should stick with Palm. My experience with RIM showed it to be more of a "closed" operating system than Palm. While there are thousands of 3rd party apps (both shareward & commercial) for Palm, I doubt you'll ever see that level of external opportunities for RIM.
Based on my testing I'm taking my group to RIM at work. But I'm going to miss my trusty and faithful Palm and all the goodies I have installed on it.
