[crabby_commuter]

I'm an early adopter. Got my first Mac in 1987 and still have the original BB Pager. I'm happy to move back to BB for my phone, and to continue with iPad and Mac at home. So I'm pretty open-minded but am pulling my hair out with some issues that could be deal-breakers.

For one, contacts and calendars - this is just something that I'm not willing to budge on and am having real trouble getting it all synced up. My iCloud has worked seamlessly and kept me very happy. I juggle a lot of appointments and this is just driving me nuts.

I'll leave it at that. I really am happy to be back with BB and wonder how others have made the transition - I just haven't had the time to look at all the videos and how-tos.

[crabby_commuter]

I just thought of something else. My goal is to have all my fun stuff on an iPad Mini. My phone, I just want for a phone and for texting. I'm having trouble tethering with an iPad - this is possibly another deal-breaker. Anyone with any experience trying this?

[100bigdaddy]

Why not use your phone as a hotspot rather than tethering?

Posted via CB10

[LoneStarRed]

Hello Crabby and welcome to CrackBerry ! There are any threads devoted to transition from Apple to BlackBerry contacts and such. Feel free to do a search and see what comes up. Yes, it will take some time on your part put, but you've already done the hard. Step. A little more perseverance and you will be richly rewarded and will have your new BlackBerry functioning at it's optimum.

" I do not think that word means what you think it means. "

[crabby_commuter]

thanks - hotspot is great - that does work Is one more secure than the other (i.e. should I persevere with the tethering issue) and other threads - yeah - had perused - sorry if this is duplicated - appreciate the responses. I'm absolutely happy to be back with BB and every time I figure something out I think whoa, this makes so much sense. But it's a little bit of mental gymnastics for sure!

[redlightblinking]

Crabby, what problems are you having with syncing contacts / calendar? What process are you using?

If you setup a gmail or outlook account on your previous phone and sync to it, then sync the new phone to it, you should all set. I took my various phones (not just BB's) out of the box, synced to gmail and outlook, and instantly all contacts and calendars were there.

[crabby_commuter]

yes - was just thinking, I recall trying the Z10 back in the day (but returned to iPhone for the ease of it still hating the touch keypad) and things synced better if I used google as the intermediary. I have been working away with my Apple contacts and think I may have it - on Apple, some of the restaurants I have loaded for example, I had checked file by business name or whatever - and some not - and thus it's not BB's fault that they came in haphazard - so I've been cleaning that up. I'm hoping that works. When I clicked on BlackBerry Link on my mac laptop, it would not allow me to select sync contacts and calendars and perhaps that is because I have my iCloud (finally) set up for that. I was frustrated to see all my twitter, FB friends, but have deselected those. This is good.

I'm really impressed with how much more Mac-BB friendly this is - and to be honest, because sometimes I land in screens without intending to, I'm not exactly sure of what my problem is

Thanks for taking the time to respond. I assume the iCloud choice overrides the BB Link choice, is that it in a nutshell?

[Plazmic Flame]

BlackBerry 10 supports the open standard of CardDAV (contacts) and CalDAV (calendar) which is what Apple uses as well.

Syncing your contacts and calendar is as simple as adding your iCloud info to the "accounts" section in BB10 settings.

Here's a link on how to set it all up: How to setup iCloud email, calendar and contacts on BlackBerry 10 | CrackBerry.com

Here's a secondary link to help you out: How to set up iCloud email, contacts & calendar on a BlackBerry Z10 smartphone | Inside BlackBerry Help Blog

[crabby_commuter]

I saw that and tried it and again, not BB's fault, I finally figured out my 2-step-authentication was what was preventing my success at adding iCloud. ARGH. I am not sure how it finally worked as I was throwing everything at it hoping something would stick, but it finally did and it's working. I'm not sure why my contacts were funky - for example a couple of hours ago I was away from home but wanted to call my doctor - and... her card wasn't in my contacts. Now that I'm home, I've been fiddling around with it all as I noted above, and it seems to be working better.

[crabby_commuter]

have another issue - first off, let me say that i had adjusted the font size to 10.

In many screens, calendar, photo, email, there is a black screen bezel-like stripe at the top of the screen that obscures the function keys - for example - I had chosen a photo to email and could not click "send" because the black of the screen was obscuring the bottom half of the word "send".

this happened a few times today in various apps - so I thought ok, maybe it's not playing nice with the font size and i went back and reset the font to the default (8).

still happens - ACK. Any ideas?

At that point I found the only way out was to swipe and close and restart and hope for the best.

[KRZR101]

have another issue - first off, let me say that i had adjusted the font size to 10.

In many screens, calendar, photo, email, there is a black screen bezel-like stripe at the top of the screen that obscures the function keys - for example - I had chosen a photo to email and could not click "send" because the black of the screen was obscuring the bottom half of the word "send".

Do you mind posting a screenshot of what you mean?

[trevorcroft]

I'm an early adopter. Got my first Mac in 1987 and still have the original BB Pager. I'm happy to move back to BB for my phone, and to continue with iPad and Mac at home. So I'm pretty open-minded but am pulling my hair out with some issues that could be deal-breakers.

For one, contacts and calendars - this is just something that I'm not willing to budge on and am having real trouble getting it all synced up. My iCloud has worked seamlessly and kept me very happy. I juggle a lot of appointments and this is just driving me nuts.

I'll leave it at that. I really am happy to be back with BB and wonder how others have made the transition - I just haven't had the time to look at all the videos and how-tos.

What do you mean "getting it all sync'ed up"? You shouldnt have to do anything, just add your email account and you're good to go.

You need to make sure you save contacts and calendar events in the correct account... by default events go to your Local calendar, so just click that and select which account you want it to go to.

Posted via CB10

[trevorcroft]

I just thought of something else. My goal is to have all my fun stuff on an iPad Mini. My phone, I just want for a phone and for texting. I'm having trouble tethering with an iPad - this is possibly another deal-breaker. Anyone with any experience trying this?

Create a mobile hotspot

Posted via CB10

[trevorcroft]

Do you mind posting a screenshot of what you mean?

Press the two volume keys at the same time to do this, just a little tip

Posted via CB10

[Pienamics]

I've been on Mac and iPhone for years. I got a classic in August 15. Here's some information for anyone thinking of escaping the Apple garden. Remember - I've got a Mac - Yosemite10.10.5. I've been using iPhones since 3G.

If you've got a Mac then there's very little useful desktop support. Blackberry Link runs, but cannot connect and synch to music, photos or videos on your Mac. There is no synch for Mac calendar and contacts via Blackberry Link connected via USB (a key selling point for me). When I called BB help for this they blamed it on Apple and said they have no plans to get BB Link working with Mac. It's a disgrace that the BB website is still claiming that Mac users can synch calendars, contacts, music, photos and videos using BB link. It's simply a lie. If music, photos and video synch is important to you then you're shagged. BB Link is useful only for backing up and restoring your BB Classic - until BB decide they can't be bothered any more.
Calendar and contacts have to be synched via iCloud - which works OK. Except - BB Cal doesn't pull in birthdays from iCloud and BB Cal doesn't pull in birthdays from Contacts. If you've spent time putting important birthdays into Contacts then you've wasted it as far as BB are concerned.

Despite the hype, I find that BB Blend is pretty useless and it's uninstalled on my Mac because I suspect it was causing Mac mail to crash. If you write a lot of texts then the ability to write them using your Mac keyboard might be useful. All my mail is IMAP, so it's already on my desktop and I don't need to see it on my BB at the same time and I don't use BB messenger. The only useful thing would be if alerts were in Blend (e.g to leave the Footy Results app open and get the alerts on my desktop now that the Sky Flash App is dead) - but BB Blend alerts don't work on the desktop - even thought there's a box to tick to enable them. I presume this is Apple's fault as well.

Theoretically, Blend is useful for copying stuff between Mac and BB Classic. Link can't see your iTunes, but Blend lets you transfer files between Mac and BB Classic - ONE FILE AT A TIME. You can't drag and drop directories. So if you've got 20GB of music - say 5000 songs in 300 directories - you'd have to create the directories on the BB one-by-one and drag the music files across one at a time. Apparently, no one in BB thinks this is unreasonable.

To transfer (not synch) files you can set the BB Classic up in USB mode and, sometimes, it appears in Finder when it's plugged in via USB and you can drag and drop anything - to BB memory or SD card. Getting the BB Classic to appear in Finder is pretty random and, frankly, a PITA. There's no correlation between the BB being in USB mode or not and whether it appears in Finder - and I've given up with it. I just pull the memory card, put it in a converter and put it in the Mac. The downside of this is that you have to power cycle the BB Classic before it will reliably see the new files (it's slooooow) and then the apps (e.g. podcast app, music app, etc) will take another age to read all the data.

Apps? The most frustrating thing is that business and productivity apps are very thin on the ground - both from BB and Amazon store. I'm a contractor. Apps I used every day on iPhone are timesheet, expenses, ToDo, note taking. On iPhone I used HT Pro, iExpensit, Appigo ToDo, Mac Notes. There are no apps for BB which come close to these in terms of utility. I've got MyTimesheet (not bad - but buggy and Dev. ignores emails), Expense Manager (a banking thing that I have to frig into Excel to get reports), ToodleTasks (OK - but no subtasks without a subscription).

It's hard to believe that there's no way to synch BB Tasks/Notes and Mac Reminders/Notes. I synch BB Notes via Evernote to Evernote on my Mac. It's OK - but it refuses to Synch on a regular basis and the account needs to be deleted and re-created and re-synched every couple of days. The lack of business utility/productivity apps was surprising to me.

Other apps
Tripit - not available for BB Classic, but BB Travel is OK.
SkySports results for Footy and Cricket; there's nothing that comes close that I've found for BB. I use FotMob but it's flaky.
Podcasts - I never thought I'd have good things to say about the iPhone podcast app, which has got to be the biggest PoS that Apple have ever produced, but it's a bloody miracle compared to the best of BB - which I think is bPod.
Metoffice weather - not available for BB Classic
Aeroweather - not available for BB Classic
FlightRadar 24 - NAFBBC
Amazon App - NAFBBC
Music Album Shuffle -NAFBBC
All my banking apps - NAFBBC
BT WiFi and Cloud Fastconnect profiles for automatic connection - NAFBBC

In addition, the main pain about the apps is that many install with no options regarding privacy and access. Most BB apps let you choose whether or not to share contacts, location, etc. If you side load via Amazon App Store then many of these give you the same option as with Android - accept all privacy invasion or don't install the app.

Battery life is looking pretty crap at the moment. I charge it overnight and it flips into battery saving by about 1800 - but I have been spending a lot of time searching for apps, and trying to make things work. Hopefully it'll settle down after a bit, but it's not looking much better than the iPhone 6.

I could have done a bit more research before I bought it (although there's nothing one can do when BB lie about their desktop apps), and it was a bit of a bargain. The keyboard is great. I think that it's more productive than the iPhone for dealing with stuff on the road. I'll give it a go for a bit longer, but I think that after Christmas (or when I've missed an important person's birthday!) I'll be back in the Apple garden, the BB will have my emergency SIM in it and will rattle about in the glove box just in case.....