The cell phone manufacturers are starting to come out with slide-out qwerty keyboards, so eventually they're going to merge.

I've been watching the whole game for quite some time now, and have held off burchasing anything like a blackberry or cell-phone that does anything more than voice and text until they finally get things to the point where I know they will, which is to have voice, email, qwerty keyboard, FM/AM, pod-casting, browsing etc. all merged.

In fact, they have models like that in the lab, but marketing has it pased to have advances released in six-month increments in order to max out the profits they make from the early adapters who like to constantly be "up to date".

I'm reminded of the time when CDs came in to replace turntable vinyl record players.

It used to be that the turntable makers had vast arrays of improvements sitting on the shelf, which they'd let out in six-month increments in order to maximize profits from each upgrade, but when they saw that CDs were going to really take over, they did one last vast gasp to maximize what was left to be made from the turntable market by releasing turntables with all the technical improvements they had lined up at once, and it was incredible the quantum leap that turntable technology did in its last dying days.

If something could come along to threaten convergent cellphone-internet technology, then you'd see the same quantum leap as suddenly out would come blackberries and iphones capable of everything and being basically indistinguishable from each other in functionality.

As it is, I'm personally giving it another 3-5 years before they'll have released enough convergent upgrades for me to think about bothering to actually use one. I have my cell phone with voice and text for when I'm on the road, and the rest of the time I'm in front of a computer perpetually connected to the internet, so I have Pidgin for messaging and an email Browser constantly open and polling, and I have VLC open all the time to do all the media streaming and playing I want, from whatever source, so I just don't see a need to buy a anything like a blackberry or an iphone for now.

Well, there are many differences between a phone and a BB. I am a loyal BB user and will admit that I am somewhat addicted to it. But on to the differences:

most BB's come with a full QWERTY keyborad
Larger screens
Built in messenger for other BB users
email server which you can link many email accounts to
full web browser
Better calendar, much easier to schedule and even link to your google calendar

all blackberries are phones, but not all phones are blackberries (quite obviously). Blackberries are made by RIM, a Canadian company, and are typically seen as a business oriented phone until recently, namely because they had a full qwerty keyboard, and supported push email and Microsoft exchange servers, both of which are vital in enterprise. They also were some of the first phones to be able to surf the internet alongside the palm treo series. With the rise of the smartphone in culture, blackberries are breaking into the "mainstream" and are even beating out the iPhone in overall sales, but that is partly because they are much cheaper and there are multiple models of the blackberry.

Blackberries hav keyboards
(p.s. i thought you meant a berry at first so you might want to be a little more presise)