BlackBerry QWERTY Phone: RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000 (AT&T)
_it04.jpg) While the all-touch BlackBerry Storm has grabbed most of our attention during the holiday season, for most of the year we were anticipating the RIM BlackBerry Bold 9000, an update to the more traditional BlackBerry look and feel. In most ways, this phone delivered. It has a great keyboard, topped by one of the best phone displays we've ever seen (earning it the Bold title). Plus, BlackBerry phones can't be beat for messaging, from their support for up to 10 e-mail accounts on one device to the great supported apps for IM from Yahoo, AOL and even Google. If there is a phone that has come to signify a QWERTY keyboard on a smart device, it's BlackBerry, and the BlackBerry Bold is the best of the bunch.
Slide-out QWERTY Smartphone: HTC Fuze (AT&T)
 HTC has a long history of behind-the-scenes work on powerful, full-QWERTY sliders, like the AT&T Tilt and the newest update, the HTC Fuze. Call it an HTC Touch Pro if you like, since it varies little from the Touch Pro devices, but the HTC Fuze edged out its cousins with a better keyboard layout and AT&T's effective XpressMail client, which made e-mail setup just a bit easier for our non-Exchange accounts. We'd love to see more support for IM clients and some social networking, but otherwise the HTC Fuze is an attractive, powerful QWERTY device.
Consumer-oriented QWERTY phone: Samsung Rant (Sprint)
 This was the year that consumer QWERTY phones started to mature, with the LG enV2 and LG Lotus leading the pack. Still, we keep returning to the Samsung Rant. It can handle corporate e-mail or personal, IM from Yahoo or status updates on Facebook. Plus, the Rant features a more robust keyboard than its older rival, the LG Rumor, and is an all-around better phone. It may borrow liberally from LG's playbook, but the Samsung Rant still has the right combination of small size, great features and low price.
Slim QWERTY phone: Nokia E71
 If you had told us a year ago that Nokia would make a super-thin, cool-looking smartphone this year, we might have been skeptical. A svelte phone with a keyboard? No chance. This is, after all, the company that designed the Nokia E90 Communicator, a phone that's sized more for a hail-Mary pass into the end zone that carrying in a jeans pocket. But the Nokia E71 gets the style just right, and provides an excellent typing experience. We wish that the phone came with more included IM and messaging options. Still, this is a Symbian S60 phone, so 3rd-party options are just a few clicks away. Plus, the Mail for Exchange handled all of our corporate e-mail nicely, and synchronized our contacts and calendars as well. For business users looking for a classy, stylish option, the Nokia E71 is a surprisingly good choice.
QWERTY for Teens: T-Mobile Sidekick 2008
 The T-Mobile Sidekick 2008 still lacks some of the killer features that the Sidekick family needs to join the next generation of messaging phones, like 3G networking, a better Web browser and support for some of the newer social options on the Web. Still, it hangs on to what makes a Sidekick great. The T-Mobile Sidekick 2008 has an interface that makes messaging easy and efficient, and brings the best messaging options to the top level. It's a true messaging phone interface, an idea sorely lacking on the numerous QWERTY phones from Verizon Wireless and AT&T that have a simple multimedia interface tacked on. We had a great time designing our own custom-printed shell for our Sidekick review unit, making this an even more personal device. The Sidekick 2008 may have fallen a bit behind, but there is still plenty that other carriers and manufacturers could learn from the Sidekick idea.
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