I definitely do NOT recommend a BlackBerry Pearl for texting. That's what I have and while I love all of the great features a BlackBerry offers, half the time when texting on it I want to throw it out the window

. The keys are very small and very close together and half the time you can hit a key 50 million times and it still puts the wrong letter in. However, I've had several phones - different brands since I was around 15/16 & the BlackBerry is the best one by far. It gets good service, never shuts off randomly (this happened a lot with my Razr) and has quite a few cool things you can do with it.
Good luck!!!