SlackBerry

So I had a BlackBerry 7250 foisted upon me last week. I bequeathed my beloved Palm Tungsten|C upon a colleague with instructions for care and embarked upon yet another technical learning curve.

BlackBerrys have recently taken over my workplace. You can always tell when someone’s got a new one because they stop paying attention in meetings and start fiddling with the BB. I hate that. It’s one thing to jot a note or check a calendar, but it’s quite another to see someone staring at the BB and chuckling when there’s nothing funny going on in the meeting. Makes me want to invest in a big container and insist that all BBs go in there upon entrance to the meeting. End of rant.

So you can see that I had no real desire for the BB. My only work computer is a laptop and it’s with me everywhere and pretty much everywhere I go has wifi. So I didn’t really feel like I needed the connectivity. And I already had a mobile phone that was perfectly servicable, which nobody called me on anyway. So I didn’t really feel like I needed a new phone. And my Palm did everthing I needed with respect to task management and calendar stuff, plus a bag of chips. So I didn’t really feel like I needed new organizer.

Well, circumstances being what they were, I buckled and took the BB. I have surprisingly few regrets. The keyboard is nicer than the one on my T|C, making email relatively easy to handle and the web browser is serviceable. The default task manager needs some help, but at least it has categories–a feature I understand is kinda new on the BB. I just wish the categories had categories and that the category assignment required fewer button presses (or at least the ability to have a default category, or auto-assign a category based on the filter in use).

The screen is definitely lower resolution than the Palm, making it kinda useless for storing pictures. The screen isn’t
touch-sensitive, so you’ve got to use keys for every kind of movement. This is helped by a scrollwheel, but it still gets annoying when you just want to scroll sideways on a document or image.

The thing was a nightmare in it’s default settings. Like most folks, I get a lot of email. The thing was buzzing every time a new note came in. Drove me nuts. I figured out where the setting was and now the only time it buzzes is when someone’s calling. Which I’ll usually miss because I refuse to attach the thing to me. Speaking of which, I’d like to find a decent case that doesn’t have a belt clip. Still looking. I may just hacksaw the clip off of the standard case that came with it.

The default "desktop" is stuffed with a bunch of icons for all kinds of stuff. All I really wanted was to see the phone, addressbook, email, browser and task manager. Fortunately, I learned that by holding the alt key and clicking the scrollwheel I can choose to hide icons and even move them around the screen. Very helpful. Now I’ve hidden most of the icons and moved the ones I use to where I want them.

Thanks to the excellent BlackBerry Forums, I found a couple of really nice programs. If you visit that link with your BB, you should download and install the ‘BBToday’ and ‘BBWeather’ programs. BBToday gives you a single page review of pretty much all the critical data in your BB, plus local weather. The BBWeather gives you, well, weather. But you can have multiple locations, whereas BBToday only allows one location. Both are useful. I haven’t tried the other stuff yet.

So, on the whole, I guess I’m pleased with the BB. It’s very nice to not have to synchronize a device with my desktop–everything synchs all the time on the BB. It’s also nice to be able to look at a contact and know that I can call or email from the same device. I like that it turns itself off at a time I choose, and back on again in the morning. That’s cool (no buzzing BB in the middle of the night). I also appreciate being able to access email and the web anywhere I have a cell phone signal. Not being reliant on wifi for those things is kinda nice, albeit slow.

That said, I’m really bummed that the task manager in the BB can synch with Outlook but not Entourage. What’s the deal with that? Both Outlook and Entourage are made by Microsoft. That sucks. If I want to synch tasks with my laptop, I’ve got to buy additional third party software. Lame.

On the topic of the task manager, any of you black belt BB users know of a decent task manager program that works well with GTD? There aren’t many options in Handango, but I can’t believe someone hasn’t already addressed this.