Home-grown devices worthy of mention
Odd you should give press to the BlackBerry and not mention the Treo 600, whose operating system was originally developed in Hong Kong (and in Chinese) by Motorola's Dragonball group.
Several months ago I was curious about the BlackBerry business model. So I got one of the 'free' BlackBerry units that Orange was offering with a year's service at HK$98 a month. It's clear where the money is made: every byte that gets pushed to you gets billed at exorbitant rates. Especially galling is the realisation that 95 per cent of this is spam - that I'm paying big bucks to clutter my BlackBerry with smut.
The BlackBerry hardware, in my humble opinion, is very nicely designed.
I like the feel of the keys better than the Treo and the device is thin (though a bit wider than the Treo, which isn't so nice).
Orange's service, though, is quite bad. Part of this is not the company's fault, but the fault of the Office of the Telecommunications Authority (Ofta) in not allowing the firm more bandwidth for telephony than the other Hong Kong providers, even though Orange has more customers.