CNET's quick guide to handheld OSBlackBerry
The darling of corporate America (and many areas of government) wouldn't be so universally adored if it was complicated. Although an interface driven entirely by a thumbwheel might seem awkward and slow, users invariably find it easy to learn and quick to operate. Admittedly, the lack of a stylus and a touchscreen--staples of other PDAs--slow down certain operations (like hitting a link on a Web page), but the beloved built-in keyboard accelerates others, such as composing email. Ultimately, the BlackBerry interface may not be the most efficient, but it's certainly one of the easiest to use.
The BlackBerry operating system does a better job managing your contacts than managing your calendar. The address book applet offers all the amenities you'd expect, plus contact grouping and unsurpassed integration with the phone and messaging apps. To send someone an email, for instance, you simply highlight the person's name, press the click wheel, and then select "Email Joe Smith". There's no need to open the contact's record and navigate extra menus. The calendar on BlackBerrys is a bit unwieldy by comparison, perhaps due to the awkward process for navigating between different days and views. The Week view is particularly cumbersome, requiring serious "wheeling" to move the cursor from one day to the next. The Calendar applet itself is sufficiently capable, but it suffers under the weight of the wheel-based interface. RIM also supplies the obligatory memo pad and to-do list, along with an alarm clock, a calculator, a photo viewer, and a password manager--all functional but rudimentary applets. Desktop compatibility Like a traditional PDA, a BlackBerry can synchronize with your PC, swapping data with Outlook or Lotus Notes; the bundled Intellisync utility makes this possible. Of course, the BlackBerry operating system also provides robust wireless synchronization, meaning new appointments, contacts, memos, and tasks can be "pushed" from your office to your handheld (and back again), just like email. That gives BlackBerrys a fairly major advantage over PDAs that rely on more traditional synchronization methods.
Although the BlackBerry operating system supports the big three Office apps--Word, Excel, and PowerPoint--it limits you to viewing documents in version 4.5. In BlackBerry OS 4.6 though (found in the BlackBerry Bold and future devices), Dataviz's Documents To Go is bundled so you get full editing capabilities. As for PDFs, the operating system can open them as well, but it strips most graphics and formatting in the process, leaving you with little more than text. Ever wonder about the origin of the "Crackberry" nickname? In a word: Email. It's what the devices were born to do, so it should come as no surprise that they excel at it. Ironically, it's not the email applet itself that's so addictive (though it deserves kudos for its streamlined efficiency), but rather the "push" method of email delivery. Instead of having to be retrieved manually, new messages just appear like magic on the device. Although Palm and Microsoft have engineered similar systems for their smart phones, BlackBerry remains the undisputed email champ. Multimedia Though BlackBerry devices have a reputation of being serious business tool, RIM has in the last year really improved multimedia performance on its devices. The BlackBerry Curve, for example, has support for many audio and video formats. In addition, all its new devices come with a 3.5mm audio jack and memory expansion so user can enjoy their music and videos easily. Third-party apps A quick search on Handango revealed more than 4,000 applications available for BlackBerry devices. This is a far cry from the mere hundreds less than two years back. While it hasn't reached the same level of support as Windows Mobile, third-party applications for BlackBerry OS are certainly plentiful so there should be something for everyone. Tags: Symbian Inc., Microsoft Windows Mobile, RIM BlackBerry, Palm Inc., multimedia | ||||||||||||
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