Blackberry Empower HTML Mail Viewer Pro Version

Posted by: dcwalton on Dec 31 2007 - 1,562 views

I had never realised quite how annoying it was not being able to read HTML emails on the Blackberry until I found out there was a piece of software that would allow you to do it - Empower HTML Email Viewer.  Ah ha! I thought to myself, that is just what I need. I have about 4 email accounts coming through my Blackberry and a couple of them are web ones like Hotmail. At the moment, these web mails are generally unreadable unless they are a simple conversational exchange between myself and a friend/colleague. I just ignore them and go check them out once online again. Then I found out about Empower HTML viewer and this review said it was great and just what I needed. So I got it.

It does display the emails in a way that is clearer to read. Any text, instead of being shown as a series of links now shows as text. That is definitely a step forward. I thought at first that the images weren’t displayed - but realised it just takes a while to load them. So now, in my "Amazon Recommends" text, I can see what Amazon recommends by title and see the mini pictures too. It costs $29.99 at full price. I know the exchange rate is great for the UK at the moment (sorry peeps!) but even at £15 that is pretty steep in my books for something that just makes your emails look a little different.

Empower HTML Email Viewer Pro also has this feature that allows you to set the background theme of your email based on which account it comes from. I thought this is a  pretty neat idea - as I said, I have 4 email accounts coming in and it would be nice to easily distinguish between them. The thing is, I don’t think it works because of one of the fundamental design features of the Blackberry (in the UK anyway). All email that you receive comes through a redirector that is set up based on your network - in my case O2. So all emails effectively come from an o2email.co.uk address no matter where they start. I think this means that I always end up with the same theme! I need to test it more to validate my theory, but going through the mails from the different sources in my Inbox, this seems to be the case so far.

I do believe that this is a feature that Blackberry’s should carry as standard - and who knows, maybe in the next generation of devices it will be built in. Meanwhile, for those of us with an existing device it provides a good solution to a frustrating problem - albeit a very expensive solution.

Empower HTML Email Viewer Pro is available at www.getempower.com/ - and at the JAMM Store at $29.99.

 Technorati Tags: Empower HTML Mail Viewer, html email, Empower, html email on Blackberry

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Application Consternation

Posted by: dcwalton on Dec 29 2007 - 352 views

In the UK there was a gap between when the Palm disappeared and the Treo appeared as an integrated mobile device. During that gap, dedicated Palm users like myself had to jump ship to another product like the Compaq iPaq or the Blackberry (as in my case). Admittedly, at the time it felt like second best, but when the Treo phone appeared it was big and ugly - all keyboard, little screen, and a big antenna sticking out the top that made it look very old-fashioned. Phones in the UK had not had an antenna for at least 6 or 7 years. Basically it had missed its chance in the UK market. I quickly got used to my Blackberry and the lack of touch screen and managed to get quite adept with wheels and clicks and with each iteration found it more and more likeable to the point where I would not even consider a Treo now - no matter how good they are.

The thing that I don’t get, and I think I must be a little weird, is where does the frustration come from with a lack of applications?

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New Blackberry Patent for Angular Keys

Posted by: dcwalton on Dec 26 2007 - 243 views

Everyone knows that women have dainty little hands and fingers and in fact, we are genetically designed to use keyboards on devices like the Blackberry. Men, on the other hand, have giant fingers making it almost impossible to press one key at a time. This means that discussions around mobile devices often centre around how easy it is to type. Now, no-one has ever said I have dainty hands - nor do I think they ever would! However, I never struggle that much using keyboards on devices either. In fact, all I ask for a is a keyboard laid out in QWERTY style with one button for each letter and an easy way to switch to capitals and symbols - and of course a spell checker. I often wonder what I did before the introduction of red squiggly lines in Word…spelt badly I guess!

Anyway, it appears that RIM has patented a new keyboard style with angular keys. This seems to have the advantage of making the keys individually much bigger - although on the diagram I saw, it also seemed to portray the Blackberry as much bigger too - definitely not a good thing! I don’t know how well this would work - when Microsoft took a similar radical step with their keyboard it worked really well but stopped you from ever being able to type on a regular keyboard again. I guess that would not be as much of an issue on the Blackberry - after all, anything that makes it easier to type on a device that is used predominantly for email has to be a good thing. What I like about this is that it is a forward step from a company that seems to have spent the last few years playing catch-up. Apart from the wheel interface, which was very unique to the Blackberry, everything else has appeared to be one step behind the market. Maybe we are actually reaching the point where they are moving ahead of the market in design?

Via: Gizmodo

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Phones should not be cameras!

Posted by: dcwalton on Dec 24 2007 - 341 views

I am a purist. I have always believed a device should do only what it was intended to do. Therefore a mobile phone should be a phone and not a camera.  A PDA should allow you to organise your diary and do email - if you wanted to use Word, Excel or Powerpoint, do it on a proper computer. I have always maintained this belief stoically until technological developments in the last year started to make me change my mind.

I like toys - technical toys, and I have changed my mobile phone and my laptop every 6 months for the last 10 years. I started off with a Palm device - changing that every time a new one came out. I was a dedicated Nokia user until Sony Ericsson came along with polyphonic ring tones and then Motorola brought the RAZR with real music ability (and a hugely sexy new design that destroyed all competitors). So my standard travel kit was a Palm device for my calendar (and solitaire), my phone for communic ations, and a laptop for the daily grind (up until very recently always a Sony Vaio). 

Then one day along came a Blackberry. It did email, real time, on the go, no synching necessary. It synch’d my calendar without me having to plug it in and press a button. It was just there for me whenever I needed it. It even played solitaire. Admittedly it did not have a touch screen, and the screen quality was pretty poor. Even worse it was a useless telephone. So I still had my Blackberry, my mobile phone and my laptop. It also did not work as a modem to my laptop - which the Moto RAZR did.  At first I thought I would prefer a touch screen interface - but soon I learnt to love the wheel. It was a very clever way of navigating - and soon I had the "fastest thumbs in the West" when it came to typing. I used to have conversations with colleagues about the best way to type but whatever we decided we all had our Blackberry’s and our mobile phones out on the desk when we were in meetings. The other downside was the screen quality being so poor - if it was too bright you could not see a thing, if it was dark you had to put the light on and it drained the batteries horribly. One of the biggest benefits for a person who was constantly travelling like me, was that it was one of the first devices to charge off the USB. As my RAZR also charged that way, it meant that I did not have to carry tonnes of heavy power cables around.

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