My First Blackberry Experience

As some of you may or may not have known, I was shopping for a new phone. I really wanted an iPhone because of its pure sexiness and the app store but my fingers didn’t really like the touch screen plus I couldn’t check my work email with it since we use Lotus Notes. This left me to decide between the Blackberry Bold and Storm. I was already a AT&T customer so I chose the Bold without even looking at the Storm since Engadget gave it such good reviews.

To be honest with you, I was not happy with my Blackberry the first couple days I had it. It seemed like I had more steps than I had to go through to do something similar like a text message. I then realized that I could move downloaded application like TwitterBerry to my homepage along with the ability to move everything around so I could have my top 6 tasks on my main page. This made a world of difference since it now gave me the app screen that I wanted in the iPhone.

So far, I have only downloaded TwitterBerry and MiniOpera. I have a 1 month trial of Telenav so I will probably download the Google Maps app once the trial is done. Let me know if I am missing an other cool apps.

Things I Am Unsure Of

• I am not sure if I like MiniOpera or the default Blackberry browser. I like MiniOpera’s speed but I prefer the web page entry method and google search in the default browser. I am piggy backing on Wifi or a 3G network most of the time so speed is not that big of a deal.
• I still need to figure out how to manage my contact list. My work address book got merged with my sim card phone address book so now I can not tell which contact is a phone number, email address or both. I would think BlackBerry Desktop Manager would do this but I haven’t found a way yet.
• How to change my calendar to default to a month view instead of a day view. I have gone through all the options and there looks to be no way that it will default to that view.

Things I Love

• The instant access of email; not sure how I lived without it
• How it automatically shows my history in a text from a person
• The ability to view the internet whenever I need it
• Instant access to my Twitter page
• Navigation

Things That Need Some Work

• The Blackberry Desktop Manager is junk. I tried to get it to scan all my music and movies (around 150 GB) but it causes my virtual memory to go so low and eventually lock up my PC. I have played around with it multiple times and got about 30 GB of music and all my photos recognized but I have a long way to go. I have given up for now.
• As mentioned before, the Desktop Manager

On one side note, I used a friends Storm the night before and was quite impressed. I was able to type a text message on the touch screen without any problems. The extra wide viewing for web surfing was quite nice too.