I took the decision last week to move back to having a Blackberry as my day to day phone. It hasn’t been an easy choice to make as I do really like the HTC Desire I have had for almost a year and feature-wise, it is excellent. However, I’ve found that its “core functionality” is lacking – that is, the features that I use every day, such as phone calls, email and text were quite difficult to do.

In specification, the HTC Desire is excellent. With a 1GHz processor, it’s pretty nippy at most things. The touch screen has good resolution and clarity and it supports multi-touch. A 5MP camera is included (a higher resolution than many of the first digital cameras).

There are many useful apps available for Android that started out on other platforms: TweetDeck or Skype to name a couple. Android itself has some excellent built in features, such as the ability to use your phone’s 3G connection via a built-in WiFi access point, which is excellent for iPad users who don’t have a 3G data plan.

However, there have been a couple of drawbacks that just wouldn’t go away and really affected day to day usage. Firstly, the battery life is really very poor. With 3G, WiFi and automatic account synchronisation all turned on, having charged it the previous night, all night, I frequently got to about 4pm and had a completely flat battery. It doesn’t give much warning that the battery is about to fail – it seems to go from 10-15% to off in no time at all. Installing a power management app helped a bit but didn’t really mean I could rely on it. Even with just 2G access, it still wouldn’t last much beyond a day. I tried a new battery but that was even worse.

Secondly, the keyboard is pretty tricky to operate unless you’re sitting down and typing is very “hit-miss” as if you make a mistake and the auto correct doesn’t figure out what you meant, some quite accurate tapping is required to input what you actually intended. There was definitely some improvement in this with the release of Gingerbread as the keyboard now has more space between the keys so it is easier to hit the right key but it is nowhere near as fast as a physical keyboard (even a small Blackberry sized one). However, this isn’t strictly an Android or HTC problem, this applies quite generally to most touch screen phones.

So, I have switched to a Blackberry Bold 9780. So far, I’m very happy with it but will reserve judgement, for now.