My old BlackBerry fell to bits, and I've been issued with a replacement. In terms of user experience, it's been a little like jumping from a Model T into a Mondeo - or perhaps the other way around. As you may or may not know, a Model T Ford has three foot pedals - although none of them is an accelerator or clutch. So it is that my fingers are having trouble unlearning the motions used to operate my old 7730, now that I have a shiny new BlackBerry Curve 8320.

It may be shiny, but is it any good? The 7730's side-mounted click wheel is gone, replaced with a "pearl" trackball, that has an action that makes me shiver in the manner of nails on blackboards. Alt-Return no longer locks the keypad. I no longer have a desktop cradle. Worse, the battery life is not as good, meaning a stone-dead BlackBerry on Monday morning where the old faithful 7730 had enough juice left to flick through a few emails on the Tube.

The 8320 is smaller and lighter, with a better screen, but the keypad is less good for typing. Bearing in mind it lives in my bag not my pocket and I also carry a phone, this newer BlackBerry is not much of an improvement. I think it's more likely to get nicked, too.

A case of two steps forward, three steps back.

On a related topic, in today's IT Week, Daniel Robinson laments the passing of Windows XP, now that Microsoft has withdrawn the operating system from the new-PC channel. "It is difficult to think of a single area where Vista is better than XP," Dan writes.

That may be fair comment but I'm still not 100 per cent sure I agree with Dan's prognosis. I recently shelled out some of my own meagre funds for a new laptop, and decided to buy with Vista preinstalled, rather than going for one of the many XP offerings still in stock.

This was not because I thought Vista was particularly great, it's just that I've conservatively picked the wrong OS twice before. I specified Windows 98 when a still wet Windows 2000 was generally considered power-hungry and pointless. And then I plumped for Windows 2000 on my next laptop when the gawky Windows XP was said by those in the know to have nothing to offer a business user. Both times I ended up regretting my decision as the newer platform became more established, proved more capable, and became more likely to work with new peripherals.

So twice bitten, thrice shy, as they don't say. This time I went for Vista.

I had a budget of £500 (not enough for a MacBook) and ended up mired in indecision, unable to decide among the incredible variety of notebooks on offer at this price point. In the end I plumped for a Samsung R20 Plus, although had I spent ten minutes' more or less time pondering I could easily have bought an Acer, HP, Sony, Dell or Toshiba for the same money.

What the R20 offers is a reasonable compromise between weight, size, and apparent sturdiness, a 14.1-inch 1280x800 screen, a keyboard with nice tactile feel for this budget, a 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM - and Vista Home Premium.

The hardware offers enough horsepower to run Vista well, complete with fancy graphical transparency courtesy of the ATI Radeon 1250M graphics subsystem, which is the weakest part of the whole box according to Vista's built-in slothometer.

As Daniel says, there's not much to write home about in terms of usability improvements. I like the miniature, real-time screen-shot that hovers into view when you mouseover items in the Windows bar at the bottom of the screen and, erm, that's about it.

I haven't had any problems with peripherals, and I also haven't experienced any issues with audio capture, processing and playback, both areas that have caused endless problems for early adopters like our own Tim Anderson.

Vista runs quickly enough, boots up rapidly compared to my XP work machine, awakens from hibernation in the blink of an eye, and hasn't crashed yet. So far the only annoyance I've spotted is that when my BT Broadband connection drops (as it tends to whenever the wind changes) the R20 sometimes can't find the internet after the ADSL router comes back online. This happens about one drop in 50, and can be cured with a reboot.

No doubt the Samsung's capable hardware would make XP absolutely fly, but it won't get the chance. It's stuck with Vista.

I wonder if I will be happy with my decision in a year's time - or will I turn out to have made three bad OS choices on the trot?