What did blackberry do so well in email?
Based on reactions from co-workers though, it seems I'm much more efficient at touch-typing than most of them, even on a fullsize keyboard. And the experience does translate to a physical phone keyboard, even at the smaller size, so that may well be where some of the disconnect is.
Note also when touch-typing on my phone, I get the full speed by using both thumbs, not just one.
Case in point: people spelling "definitely" as (I assume) "definately" only to be autocorrected to "defiantly" without noticing. That sort of "correction" completely changes the meaning of a sentence.
Every time haptic feedback turns off for "power saving" when I'm running low on battery, I immediately wonder how anyone ever manages to type anything at all without mucking things up all the time.
I'd still prefer a physical keyboard, though.
Stipulated, it definitely depends on personal preferences and workflows as to what you personally prefer.
But it is pretty incontrovertible that Blackberry was a finely-honed email tool with departures from that core use case being pretty tightly defined around the things you do ancillary to email (setting appointments, reading attachments, etc.).
iPhone is worse at that particular thing -- but vastly more capable broadly speaking for a universe of other things.
Other than that, what specifically did it enable that the other phones didn't?
The BlackBerry Email client definitely didn’t have a method of integrating third party storage providers like Dropbox which was definitely a thing by 2011.