My least favourite gadget: the Blackberry

Attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has meant that I've had to reacquaint myself with a gadget that is guaranteed to wipe the smile from the face: the Blackberry smartphone.

While I maintain a healthy cynicism for the Apple iPhone 4 that is my everyday handset, it's hard to deny it provides an interface that makes it simple to use. Basic operations such as call handling, messaging, network access and text messaging took little figuring out. 

Not so with the Blackberry. Admittedly I'm using one of the older models but the frustration felt when I first used one two years ago at CES resurfaced within seconds (my company provides the Blackberry for overseas trips where mobile data roaming charges are excessive for our personal accounts). 

The full qwerty keyboard, supposedly one of the device's main attractions, is fiddly to use. It's not just the size; positioning the Alt key required to access numbers is right next to those same number keys, which makes the keyboard feel cramped when typing. The miniature tracking wheel used to navigate menus and documents is imprecise, too. 

But it's the interface that drives me crazy. One of the biggest problems I've had with the Blackberry in Vegas is getting it to sync with our shared Google calendar for our appointments at the show. Blackberry provides an app to handle the sync and this worked well, but despite setting the calendar and phone to the correct US time zone, the Blackberry calendar displays our appoints in GMT. My colleague James has figured to how to display the correct times, but it involves changing the phone clock back to GMT. You just don't get this problem with iOS.

It may be that there's a clever way to solve this, but a few days of peering at the options screens like dogs contemplating a early remote control has left James and I utterly frustrated with this handset. 

CES 2012 opens it doors on Tuesday and I look forward to seeing a wide range of impressive gadgets. But I'll be happy to get back to London just to hand this hopeless phone back to our IT department and get back to a phone that just works the way I want it to.