[BlackberryNewbie59]

Hello All,

Reading through some of the posts, I gotta say this is an extremely friendly community and im glad i've found this site. I have a few questions I need some help on.

1. Do I absolutely HAVE to purchase a third party email program to view emails with pictures or html support? If so, which is the best program?

2. How in the WORLD do I open PDF files? As a last resort, I emailed a PDF to myself, and it opened it, but it took a weekend to navigate. Very unproductive.
But from the device itself, I cannot figure out how to open a PDF file. I have loaded it through the SD card in my blackberry.

3. In my treo, my home screen for SMS messages were extremley clean and clear. One user, and one long conversation. Here, it seems my email and messages are mixed together. Any way around that?

4. In my treo, I had birthdays set for all my contacts. When my contacts got imported from Outlook to my 8830, all birthdays were lost. Seems like blackberry has no birthday reminder support? Or would I have to purchase a third party software for a better address book also?

5. Is it true I cannot view/edit/add contacts, memos from desktop manager?????? Thats what the sprint rep told me. This is


Seems now a days that is how they're making money, charging an arm and a leg for software that should be already included in your phone. Kinda sad to find this out after you purchase the phone.




I appreciate all the help in advance... so Thank you,


-blackberrynewbie

[snowboarder61]

Well, first off, welcome to the BB community!

I am still fairly a newbie, but i will answer a few questions until some of the more informative people get on the boards in a few hours..

1. As of right now, Empower i believe, is the choice of HTML email viewers among many on here and in the blackberry community... I do not know for sure if there is a free program as of right now, but coming here in the next few months, OS 4.5 will be out and will be able to view HTML email without a payware application.. Or so we hope (4.5 being out that is)

2. Not sure, someone else will have to answer this one. There are a few pdf readers out there if i remember correctly

3. You can go into your Message folder and hit menu (blackberry button) Go to Options>General Settings and then down at the very bottom, there is a "SMS and EMail inboxes" selection... you can set it to seperate/theme controlled/combined there...

4. I don't have outlook so i couldn't help you here!

5. I haven't been able to find that option on the Desktop manager... at least not on my version, but i haven't heard of mention that someone has been able to do that either!

Hope i could help you!

Others will chime in tomorrow and let you know if i made any mistakes!

Brandon

[BBIronMan]

1) If you sit tight a little while native BBOS 4.5 will be rolling out with HTML support. There are other posts here and on the main blog roll about the 4.5 release. To clear something up, Empower and BBSmart actually don't provide HTML email, they just prettify email the way they think it should be with the remaining HTML that hasn't been stripped. In reality the BES and BIS strip HTML from the messages.

2) I use RepliGo Pro (Cerience Corporation - RepliGo Document Solutions for Mobile Devices) to keep a set of files on my BB ready to be opened and navigated. I've been happier with this solution over keeping emails saved with attachments to open. But that is another option. I never did figure out how to save and re-open just the attachments without third-party software. Documents to Go will be coming soon for Word, XLS, and PPT too BTW.

3) BB doesn't support the same SMS threading the Treos do. But you can go into Messages -> Options -> SMS to choose if you want them to be displayed in the same Messages folder or in another folder. You can also adjust the number of previous entries you want it to show in the current SMS you open.

4) BB does have a birthday field. Use the DM sync -> settings -> advanced to make sure that the field mapping is correct. I'm not aware of automatic birthday reminders on the BB natively.

5) The DM is just to coordinate software loads, backups, syncing with your PIM, etc. You can't directly edit information that is managed in your PIM from the DM. But by default it will try to sync your PIM notes, memos, etc. So I'm unsure why you'd want DM to natively edit your PIM information or perhaps I misunderstanding your question.