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.

1. 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]