When BMW came out with the X5 they were not concerned with stealing away from Jeep, etc. It's a product offering and segment that they wanted to be in. It's not BMW's bread and butter---cars are. RIM is doing the same thing. Their R&D is not all dedicated to one phone like the iPhone or one segment--they are a business phone segment leader. The X5 is an "SUV" yet you ask a Jeep owner and they say it is isn't. RIM will need to be competitive in the iPhone, Droid segment but they aren't ever going to be #1 in it.

I don't think they are in the same category at all. The comments above from posters happy with their RIM devices are generally talking about a reliable phone that gets emails and has a calendar. The people buying iPhones seem to be attracted to games, videos, downloading music, style, etc in addition to (or maybe in lieu of) the above communication activities. That is great, and not a criticism, but it doesn't sound like the RIM target market.

My benchmark isn't CPU speed, which I don't understand the relevance of, but rather functionality for what I use it for.

Good link BGM.

I should have made my point clearer...the weakest part of the BB OS was their web browser which finally with BB OS 6, they have rectified with a web-kit browser. However, either the current version of BB OS 6 is not fully optimized or their CPU is on the slow side, the web browser rending is not a smooth or fast as iPhone's or Android's web-kit browser. Using the internet for business use is important. So maybe their CPU is fine, though anything less than 1GHz is on the slow side today. I hope with newer version of BB OS 6.x, the web browsing experience will be smoother. Anyhow, if you like BB OS, stay with BB OS.