Comment by freedomben

I think nostalgia tends to corrupt our memories somewhat, but the peak usefulness of my phone really was my last blackberry. There are certainly modern conveniences that are game changers and I would not want to live without, such as Google maps and audio players (music, podcasts, audiobookshelf), but as far as a communication device for text messaging and email, my blackberry with keyboard was insanely productive. The soft keyboards on modern smartphones are just terrible. Google's latest speech to text has gotten pretty good, probably to the point where it is equivalent to where things were with the blackberry, but if you are writing something that can't be easily spoken or if it gets punctuation incorrect, it is a pain in the ass to fix it with the soft keyboard.