Well, the BlackBerry is coming along nicely. I’m gradually getting it to work the way I want it to work.
So far, the cool bits are:
- Google Maps uses either GPRS or GPS (you can connect a GPS receiver with Bluetooth)
- Yahoo! Messenger works off the bat and can stay connected at all times. Never miss an IM again.
- Google Sync syncs up with phone with my online calendar – finally a computer-less way to do this!
- Impressive battery life. Even though I have been caning the phone with online and Bluetooth as well as loads of phone calls – it breezes through the day without any problems.
- The Pearl is noticeably smaller than the N80 and the Razr. This goes against my reputation of having a brick-like phone.
There are some other neat things as well. I had some trouble transferring contact data from my N80 to the BlackBerry, but after some experimentation I found a way to do it that didn’t require a computer. It was somewhat tedious having over 100 contacts though.
I still want to get an IM program installed that will use MSN, as some of my business contacts use this. This will tie in with Yahoo! and Google Talk nicely and round it all off.
The built-in browser is a bit useless, so I’ve installed Opera Mini which can render pages properly when the browser gets stuck. I often find myself flitting between the two though, as Opera doesn’t seem to handle downloads properly.
The only downer is that the BB Pearl doesn’t seem to connect to Ubuntu properly through USB – and the Bluetooth connection is a real pain in the arse. This is probably going to make any kind of synchronisation very difficult – to nigh on impossible. There are the Linux Barry tools in development, which have some way of backing up data and things – but I haven’t had the chance to have a play with these yet.
All in all – the experience is going well, and I’m hoping that I can import my MSN contacts into Google Talk soon. Unfortunately to do that, I need to update our company domain SRV records which is opening another can of worms…