Funny, I find a lot more people fall "out of love" with their Blackberry devices than their iPhones. I know about a dozen people with iPhones, ranging from just-got-it to bought-it-first-month. I don't hear any of them griping about their phones, ever. They gripe about AT&T, but not their phones. Except for one, they all owned Blackberries before the iPhone.
Contrast this with the several dozen people who have Blackberries (including me). We all complain about the devices, ranging from Pearls and Storms through my Tour and a few Curves. They all have fatal flaws, in the hardware and in the software. I have yet (in my admittedly short time on Blackberry, just a few months) to see any of the significant software flaws addressed by Blackberry.
Personally, I find the BB's "you must have notification for every email ever sent to your accounts ... and, no, I don't do junk mail filtering; why would you want that?" attitude highly annoying. Not BB's fault directly, but my wife composes an email in Google Mail and gets dozens of "new" messages on her BB, which are the drafts of that email Mail saves on the server; the "don't include sent mail" option on Google Mail doesn't work, so you can always tell if she's composing a long email by the constant dinging and buzzing of her phone and the under-her-breath cursing. How about apps being able to keep the BB from charging when they are on and it is plugged in (which absolutely shocked me)? You think BB will address that issue?
On the other hand, the Tour's scroll ball actually works, which is a distinct improvement over the Pearl, so I suppose BB is getting their hardware issues figured out. Now if only we didn't need to force resets on the damned things every couple of weeks...
Wow, BB is going to catch up to the rest of the industry? I hadn't heard that. Will I get a WebKit browser in my Tour? That would be awesome. Except, of course, BB's funky control scheme makes browsing painful (browsing on a phone without a touch screen is just a losing proposition), but at least being able to visit sites I visit regularly while I'm out and about would be a huge step forward. You think they'll fix their crappy bookmarking system with something that actually works, too? How about making typing URLs easier by not treating the address field like every other text field on the phone (two awkward button presses to get the '.' of 'www.' or '.com' ...)?
The Storm guys hate their browser too. I suspect that's the only place BB will roll out a Webkit browser, although I might be wrong.
Good for you. I hope the BB experience does improve, because being on Verizon (I like my phone service to be available where I go, silly me) I'm stuck right there with you for the next ~2 years. If the iPhone isn't available when I have phone trade-in cash again, I'll be ditching this BB train for an Android train.
On the other hand, while BB has seen growth, and they are just under twice Apple's numbers, Apple is gaining on them pretty fast. They had well over 2x advantage Q2, and have slightly under 2x advantage at the end of Q3, and this with no major iPhone advances to spur growth in that time and despite several major BB rollouts (Storm 2, Tour, etc) I don't think BB's future is quite as bright as you think it is. They are losing dominance in the smartphone market as fast as they gained it when their only competition was Windows Mobile and Palm OS.
IMHO, you'll see BB dominance shrivel to a core nugget of hardcore "business" users - the guy in IT who needs to have his notifications the instant the server goes down - but lose completely in the consumer space (they've tried there, but failed several times) and in the executive space (BB's just aren't cool anymore, and their annoyances don't make up for it). That is, if Android doesn't swoop in and eat their lunch there.
