Everytime my friends see my Blackberry, they say, "It's time to ditch that." That's even before it got scratched and dented and now has bits falling off – actually bits have fallen off but hey, it still works.

One friend even took a photo of it because he couldn't believe how anything could get so battered.

But see, I am proud of my battle-scarred device (left) and I don't care that people tell me it's not a smartphone, it's only a feature phone – the point is, its features work for me.

Okay, it's a completely different experience from the iPhone 5 which I recently succumbed to – but that doesn't negate the value of my BB and my relationship with it. Point is, I am sentimental about my BB and I do not like the way everyone seems to be writing them off before they've even seen the new Blackberry 10s.

Which is why I was pleased that during the recent launch of its two new smartphones, CEO Thorsten Heins chose to highlight the BB's special relationship with women and named superstar singer Alicia Keys as the company's global creative director.

Apparently, 56% of Blackberry's 80 million global customers are women.

And, according to this article in Mashable, when the company was working on BlackBerry 10, its marketing team set out to identify the segment it most wanted to focus on, and ran down a list of traits: people of action, achievers, multi-taskers, people who are very connected and "want a tool more than a toy."

In the end, chief marketing officer Frank Boulben says the team found these traits tended to be "slightly more skewed to women than men". And the company may introduce more apps and accessories that are geared towards women.

Keys is apparently the embodiment of a "very typical BlackBerry user" who is a "working mom" and runs a small business.

Read all about it why Yeoh Siew Hoon is not ditching her BB:

www.webintravel.com/blog/no-i-am-not-getting-rid-of-my-bb-and-heres-why--witx-set-for-bangkok-april-26_3554