'6,000 RIM jobs at risk' of a pink slip

Not all areas - I have yet to type on a keyboard anywhere near as good as the ones RIM makes. And their hardware build quality is just superlative; my 9800 slider has taken egregious punishment and still snicks open and closes like new. Materials are first rate; the feel and textures in the 9800 and PlayBook are great.

Unfortuntely, the old BB software on the 9800 is terrible. The 'key lock' button is on top, very wide and flat, and needs almost no click pressure. And the screen somehow gets triggered by fabric. Result? While walking around with the bb in my pocket, I've written 900 page emails, taken dozens of photos, and alarmingly, got one click away from sending a text message to everyone in my address book... In Arabic.

It also tends to do things like turn on Glympse, and thus the GPS, which I only notice when my pants get very hot and my battery is 90% dead.

That's another area of excellence, by the way - I can go two days of phone, extensive web, and music playing, on one charge.

Unless the phone has turned on the GPS...

The screen's supersensitivity has caused me no end of troubles during calls, too: the mute and hild buttons are huge, and aren't turned off(quickly enough?) when you put the phone to your face. Cue accidentally muting calls I've just made, putting the pizza place on hold a moment before I give them my order, and hanging up on my wife the instant I answer the phone.

I desperately want to love RIM, but their products being terribly flawed is ironically made even worse by their closeness to the excellence they had in 2005 when I got my first 7800.