Me and my crackberry - a love affair
I took the plunge and accepted the completely free Blackberry 7100 phone with it's unlimited voice and unlimited data plans. I figured, what's the harm? I can always lock it in a drawer. Maybe I should have. It's my new best friend!
It gets e-mail. Not just my work e-mail (continuously pushed by my corporate servers) but also my personal mail from Devcow.com. That's seriously sweet! It frequently checks that mailbox and notifies me I've got mail before my laptop has even received the mail. Very nice. It can also send mail from both accounts, although I do occasionally have problems sending from Devcow.com (I've not figured that out yet, but I've not really researched it).
Have a Blackberry? Free games at mobile.blackberry.com include a frogger clone, a surprisingly good version of Asteriods, a Bubbles game and a Bass Fishing game (that's about as much fun as it sounds). Want to really kick things up a notch? Navigate your blackberry to www.google.com/glm and download Google Local. You get Google Maps on your phone! Complete with driving directions and location search. Last night, for Valentines Day I looked up the restaurant using Google Local, called to confirm my reservations, and got turn by turn directions all with my phone. Seriously - this is great!
I am pretty used to the typing already - there are tons of built in shortcuts to speed things up. Ex - hit space twice and it fills in the period at the end of a sentance for you. The memo pad and the e-mail are already the things I use most. Aside from the 400 contacts I've got loaded into the phone. This is the first phone I've owned which actually successfully and easily synched to Outlook. I'm having to manually retrieve data from my Nokia phone and put it into Outlook. This is the last time I'll have that particular problem....
One more nice feature. I've already set up and tested using the phone as a wireless modem for my laptop. Now, when I'm in a meeting somewhere I can plug my Blackberry in via USB and start surfing the web or answering e-mail using my laptop. Not blazing fast, but a slow connection is better than no connection.
So - the moral of the story is, if someone offers you a free smartphone with unlimited voice and unlimited data - take it. What could go wrong?
-- Matt Ranlett
PS - Kim already is telling me that I can wait like 5 seconds if I get an e-mail. That I don't have to ALWAYS check on the thing... Boy is she wrong. It demands attention with blinking red lights and vibrating insistence.