Another 48 hours with the BlackBerry. There is a lot to like, and some not as much. The biggest issues for me are still the lack of IMAP functionality and the ability to reply from a different address.
More notes:
- Battery life is decent - I got about 2 days out of it and my house isn’t in a real strong coverage area.
- Yay, a Bluetooth headset seems to work properly! Scott’s testing with the Treo 650 and my testing with the a900 (neither works well) make this a bigger deal than it should be.
- I think I’ve got a set of rules set up that work using FastMail’s forwarding option and filters on the BlackBerry side. The main two things I’m doing are: 1) filtering out spam and 2) not sending mailing list traffic to the BlackBerry.
- PocketMac is simply unable to sync my calendars. The current product wants to sync all of my calendars instead of just the one or two I was syncing with my Palm OS devices. They hope that the next release will fix this. More thoughts on this later.
- The ringtone I made from an MP3 a little while back1 works fine as a ringtone on the BlackBerry. In contrast, the a900 will play the ringtone just fine - as long as it’s not set as the actual ringer.
- Matt’s suggestion to think of the BlackBerry as an e-mail notification device rather than an e-mail client is a better mental model for what it does. Now I just need to decide if that’s something I want - giving up the IMAP goodness I had on the Palm OS.
- All mobile devices should use mini-USB for charging and syncing. My Motorola H700 headset does as well.
UPDATE: More BlackBerry posts worth reading here and here.
- I’d never had a phone that could accept ringtones before and I was curious how easy it was to use one. It was not easy, and eventually didn’t work. [back]
Popularity: 4% [?]
Ethan adds this Comment:
The blackberry works the very very best when you use it with BES and an Exchange server. For me, that server is the hub of my information (now Mailstreet), and the blackberry, my 3 macs, etc the nodes from which I access.
Oh, and .mac to sync Yojimbo.
And a Lacie encrypted external drive for my data
April 21st, 2006 at 11:10 am
alexking.org: Blog > Viable Mobile Platforms adds this Pingback:
[…] The main reason I’ve decided to make the jump to the BlackBerry, despite it’s shortcomings, is that I no longer have any faith in the Palm OS as a platform. […]
April 27th, 2006 at 8:41 am
jason adds this Comment:
I can select alternate addresses to send from. I just scroll up and select them. All 6 are available.
May 18th, 2007 at 12:52 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Those are your accounts, not alternate From addresses on a single account.
May 18th, 2007 at 12:53 pm