Find Me for Facebook from ElectricPocket.

Posted by: Peter Murphy on Mar 21 2008 - 352 views

ElectricPocket this week announced a new application for Windows Mobile and BlackBerry devices. FindMe allows you to update your facebook friends, with your location. Clever thing here is it is not GPS dependent, it determines your location via cell phone tower triangulation.

FindMe enables users, their friends,
family and colleagues to share their current locations automatically and
securely through their BlackBerry or Windows Mobile Smartphones without
needing GPS. FindMe offers the opportunity to "tag" commonly visited
locations, such as home, office, soccer field or favourite bars and
restaurants, and post those locations on their Facebook profiles.

Being only recently facebooked myself, I can see that this would be useful if your friends are all in one place, and you want to arrange a Face to Face not a facebook.

"Social networking sites such as Facebook are removing geographic barriers
to keeping friends connected, and FindMe adds a great new dimension by
sharing locations among friends when and how they want to be seen,"

FindMe is available for all trackball BlackBerry devices [81xx series (Pearl) , 83xx series (Curve) and the 88xx series] and all GSM Windows Mobile Phones.

You can view the original press release, or just head on over to the product page to download it and give it a try

 

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AT&T Offers Up BlackBerry Pearl 8120 with WiFi … no 3G?

Posted by: Brandon Steili on Mar 14 2008 - 727 views

Knock Knock. HEY RIM. The future is at the door and seriously guys its time to get in touch with her. EDGE data is not going to cut it for devices just hitting the market. How long did it take RIM to figure out that people wanted cameras in their phones? Media players? Yea… way too long. Here’s to hoping they figure out that 3G AND WiFi would be the way to go and make that the standard for the next revision.

The Pearl 8120 features an updated 2 megapixel camera, as well as a new web browser. WiFi has also been added, giving users the ability to get a taste of high-speed data.

Of course … here’s a taste of something cool. But only if you go to Starbucks

Anyway, the doomed to be popular Blackberry Pearl 8120 is NOW available from AT&T for a (relatively) low price of $200 with a 2 year contract or $350 off contract. Hit the link below for all the specs and info - via MobileBurn

CLICKY

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Blackberry Innovation?

Posted by: Peter Murphy on Mar 01 2008 - 351 views

OK, I’ve never had a BlackBerry other than the fruity kind, and the fruit is much more pleasant to look at than the selection of BB’s pictured. I’m sure there’s plenty of people that disagree with me, but I don’t care. There’s no way I could persuade myself that I want a device that looks like, well anything like these, the form factor dislike also extends to Palm Treo’s as well.

There you go, in the same way that I dislike these devices purely for aesthetic reasons, I dislike the way that they seem to have invaded the psyche of the uninitiated masses, I mean how many times have you had to launch into the full three hour diatribe [concise version cause they must be an idiot] when some moron asks you about your Blackberry/Palm Pilot thingy when you pull out your WinMo device.

So when I see RIM filing a patent for a….

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Finally! A $10,000 Case for Blackberries Too

Posted by: PatrickJ on Jan 30 2008 - 623 views

What took so long?  I posted a couple week ago at our lovely sister site about a $20,000 case for the iPhone.  Luckily for any Blackberry owners feeling left out of the ‘Costs Less Than a Sports Car’ case-acquiring club, the same good people at Case-Mate have come along with a knock-down $9,999 case for the Blackberry Curve.

Introducing the world’s first diamond BlackBerry Curve case…

The Case-mate Diamond Case is handcrafted with 1.25 carats of gorgeous diamonds set in 22K gold stars, embedded in a rare gold carbon fiber leather case. With VVS1 clarity and H color, these diamonds are superior in quality. Complete with an 18K gold emblem, the Case-mate Diamond BlackBerry Case is truly a one of a kind.

But that’s not all. The Diamond Curve Case is crafted of luxurious Carbon Fiber leather, previously available only in high end aftermarket cars (Techart Porsche) and very high end cell phones (Vertu). Case-mate worked closely with its leather craftsmen to develop this rare gold leather for this very special BlackBerry Curve case.

Quantities are extremely limited, so preorder the Diamond BlackBerry case today. 4-6 week delivery, free shipping.

Quantities are limited - and your shipping is free, so get a move on eh.

Oh, and I’ve just got to ask whether any of you Curve owners feel your device is just a.little down-market now, given how ridiculously cheap this case is compared to the iPhone model?  Anyway, if you need to get your hands on one of these - or even two for the price of just one of the iPhone ones! - head over to:

Case-mate Gold & Diamond Blackberry Curve Case page

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Blackberry Empower HTML Mail Viewer Pro Version

Posted by: dcwalton on Dec 31 2007 - 1,758 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 - 358 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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