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You sound like me; those things are also the most important to me on a phone. My solution was to stick with WP7 on the HTC Arrive. It has all of the above, in fact I SSH into my Arch box and Raspberry Pi with it all the time. The keyboard is a hinged slider, but for me that's actually better as I have large hands (I'm just under 2m tall, or 6'4" here in the States). It's also fast, very stable and stays out of my way.

All that said, the workflow-centric design on what little I've seen of the new BB interface rivals WP7, and may surpass it once it's all out in the open.

Good for you.

But for me, I pick up my phone to check the weather radar and twitter and to take pictures and upload them and to check maps and the next train departure and to identify that song which is playing right now on the radio and to check the album on Spotify.

Have fun with your SSH.

(Who's making calls anymore, annyway? Texting is so much more convenient, especially with Swiftkey's word predictions.)

I am, for one. My full time job requires that I have a phone at all times (government job). My part time job doesn't require it, as long as I can be reached in some fashion. But I also do a lot of consulting work on the side, and many of my clients prefer the professionalism of a voice connection rather than texting.

If it were up to me, I would never talk on the phone. My fiancée is the same way; we communicate almost exclusively by text and email when we're not together. But given my work requirements, a cellphone that's actually a decent, usable phone is critical. That became painfully apparent every time I used an Android phone; a dialer that crashes or is otherwise buggy on a phone is unacceptable. In those instances, I may as well have had a miniature tablet for all the good the "phone" part did me.

I'll tell you why, because for most people, making calls is merely one of the things they do on their phone, and in many situations, they do it less than simply using email or texting. This is how many people I know are - in fact, I know people who use GB of data but only use about 100 minutes of talk a month.

You must have seen my phone bill! That is what my usage pattern looks like, along with a few thousand texts per month.

But, those 50-100 voice minutes I use each month are critical. If I was stuck with a device that was rock-solid on the texting/data front, but wouldn't allow me to reliably communicate by voice when it became necessary, it would be a broken device as far as I was concerned. And when that has happened to me in the past, I moved to a working device.