1. r0k's Avatar
    I've come over to the Berry side. I've put Palm down or at least secondary in my mobile device priority.

    There are some things I like and some things I don't like. Here goes...

    Email Setup
    It's simple. Dead simple. Easy. Too easy. Why too easy? Because it never offered me a chance to set it up as IMAP. Shouldn't IMAP be the default easy path instead of dealing with servers and ports just to enable IMAP instead of POP? I wound up setting up my gmail account twice. No big deal really but I think IMAP should have been the default or at least selectable when using Blackberry's dead simple email setup.

    Phone
    It's a little clunk for me after being used to palm, but it works well as a phone and I'm sure I can learn to live with it.

    Touchscreen
    Good riddance. I find myself reaching for the dreaded stylus several times a day and happily remembering I don't need no stinking stylus! Yay!

    Browser
    What's up with that? It's usable but pretty awful. It's better than the Palm browser but this thing is no iphone. I'm tempted to upgrade to 4.5 but the browser works well enough I'll just live with its limitations.

    Always Connected
    This is SWEET. No waiting for a stupid "connecting" dialog. No staring at a verizon logo for over 90 seconds. It simply does what I need when I need it. This is the biggest selling point for BB as far as I'm concerned.

    Swap
    Verizon has a new "quick phone swap" feature. You simply dial *228 from the phone you want to use temporarily and it becomes your new phone and you don't need your esn. VZW figures it out 'cuz you're calling from the phone you want to activate. Wicked! Only problem is that I doubt I'm gonna ever swap back to the 755p.

    Always Connected WITH Great Battery Life
    The always on connection is so sweet, I cannot imagine going back to a device that isn't connected. I tried push email on my 755p. It sucked away 50% of my battery by LUNCH. On my new BB, I've been doing email solid all morning and the battery hasn't even budged! Sweet!

    Clunky
    It was hard to find the profile to set "phone only" to vibrate. A lot harder than it needed to be. It was hard to find a few other things. And it's not simply because I'm learning a new OS. There is some awkwardness on this device. Though it's nothing I can't live with.

    Apps
    I have not installed any apps yet. I'm considering splashid but I might just live with BB's internal password safe. Especially if I find out it's backed up. I can use PocketMac for Blackberry to back up my device, right?

    Wireless Backup
    I'm looking for a wireless backup solution. Either back up my device to microsd or back it up to some cloud somewhere once a day. So far I haven't found anything.

    OS 4.5
    I'm giving some thought to loading OS 4.5 on my device but I don't know how much time I really want to invest tinkering. 4.2.x is working and I'd like to focus on learning the device fully before I delve into such an extreme tweak. Perhaps VZW will finally get off their butts and officially support and release 4.5. Ok, I know it's a long shot.

    Size and weight and keyboard lock
    I'm very happy to have a device that is thinner than that thick and chubby Treo I've been walking around with. This morning I held a squirming puppy and it hit some key and got voice dialing started. If that's the only time my device gets turned on doing something I don't want then great. My Treo would turn itself on several times a day in my shirt pocket with a few pencils even with the keyboard locked. I'm not ready to consider locking the BB keyboard unless I find it waking up in my pocket as much as my Treo once did.

    Brickbreaker
    Nice. Fun. Part of the reason I'm moving away from Palm is to put handheld games behind me so I think I'll pass on Brickbreaker.

    Ebooks
    No solution found yet.

    Photos/MicroSD/Cables vs Bluetooth
    All the photos I once had on my Treo are now loaded on my BB. It was easy once I found an obscure setting for the microsd and switched it to ON. I simply dragged and dropped the photos to the Pictures folder when the BB was connected to my Macbook. Shouldn't I be able to do this sort of thing over bluetooth?!?

    Email attachment handling
    I just received an email with a 53K doc attachment. This would have been an odyssey on my 755p (save to sd card documents folder, exit email forgetting where you were - single tasking OS, open docs2go s-l-o-w-l-y, browse to the attachment you just saved, what was that name again? whew). It was one click on my Blackberry. Yay!
    11-13-08 08:55 AM
  2. thepaintedpony's Avatar
    Wow, long post.

    First, welcome to the CB family. :-)

    As far as the browser goes - install Opera Mini - you'll be glad you did. Agreed that the default browser is bad.

    For other cool apps, look here http://forums.crackberry.com/f2/popu...d-links-21096/

    I highly recommend you do NOT upgrade the OS until you're familiar with the phone. Check out the BlackBerry 101 How-To Lecture Series | CrackBerry.com, which has lots of helpful tips. You would be one unhappy camper if you nuked your BB before you had a chance to use it. Upgrades can go good and bad - so enjoy and get familiar with the phone.

    The last thing I'll say is - you came to the right place... you are surrounded by BB smarties - and they love to help - so welcome to the family!
    11-13-08 09:00 AM
  3. r0k's Avatar
    Thanks Kristi!

    I've been going through the BB 101 lectures here at crackberry. Very handy. Very nice. I haven't looked at the blackberry.com BB 101 yet but I will.

    Convenience key
    I wonder why RIM left the convenience key default to voice dialing? Is voice dialing the first thing a newbie sets up on their BB? I think not. But the convenience key is the first key I hit whenever I try to put away my BB or take it back out of my shirt pocket. I found my way into the options menu and set it to a nice safe NOTHING. Whew. I will probably set it to something useful later. Much later. It turns out the side key is something I rarely used on my Treo but it was much harder to press and therefore less likely to be pressed accidentally.

    Opera Mini 4.1
    I installed Opera Mini 4.1. Very nice. There is a new 4.2 beta out and I think I'll take a look at that as well.
    11-13-08 12:18 PM
  4. r0k's Avatar
    Well I'm walking around with my 8830 and my 755p is collecting dust. I had a hairbrained scheme to swap phones a couple of times a week so I could better understand the tradeoffs. Not gonna need to do that.

    Here's the tradeoff and it took me less than one day walking around with the BB to figure this out: Always On Internet Connection.

    Think about that a second or two. No "connecting" dialog box to stare at. No Verizon logo. Nothing but NET. And battery life? If I had been surfing the net more than a half hour on my 755p, I'd need to charge it. I've been on the net all morning and finally after lunch one battery bar went down. Woah. Maybe a charge will only hold me a through five of days of net usage.

    I've never been a big fan of the touchscreen. Hence my somewhat lukewarm reception of the almighty iPhone and even the Storm. I caught myself reaching for the stylus several times today and was thrilled when I remembered there isn't one. I've already got something in my hands when I have a smartphone and chances are the other hand is otherwise occupied and having to use a stylus seems like foolishness for a handheld phone. Perhaps it's ok for a PDA but not for a device I have to use "in the field".

    My favorite PalmOS game was target. It was played with the stylus by tapping letters on the screen. But on a Treo it really should have been a keyboard based game. Perhaps it will become available for the BB.

    While I had considered trying to do things on the BB and on the 755p side by side just to compare, it is pretty clear it is no contest. Nevertheless, if I do get a chance to do a comparison I will come back to this thread and update it especially when the 755p does something better. And yes there are a lot of things the 755p could do better.

    I could go on about the clunkiness of the BB menus versus Preferences in PalmOS but I really don't want to push this thread in the direction of a BB vs Palm discussion. My reason for switching is not that one or the other is better, it just happens that network centric things are a higher priority for me than PDA centric things these days. For my needs and based on my brief experience, BB is better at network centric things in today's world. In fact...

    I do have one suggestion for the next PalmOS based on my brief foray into WM and then into BB territory: Always on net with decent battery life. Both WM and BB have a long way to go to be as elegant and simple as PalmOS but both WM and BB handle net so much better than Palmos. And when I say always on net, I don't mean that chattermail "background" approach to push that took my device down to the 26 percent state of charge level by noon. Do something that removes the delay in getting data while preserving decent battery life. If somebody asks about a type of pasta when looking at the menu and you can't find the answer until the dessert course forget it!

    (also posted at brighthand)
    Last edited by r0k; 11-13-08 at 01:53 PM. Reason: Added link
    11-13-08 01:28 PM
  5. mding4gold's Avatar
    Hello & welcome to the addiction!!!
    11-14-08 05:19 AM
  6. Duvi's Avatar
    Welcome 2 Crack
    11-15-08 02:42 AM
  7. Username01939's Avatar
    Welcome to Crackberry!
    11-15-08 10:56 AM
  8. BuddyL's Avatar
    First of all, welcome aboard! Secondly, thanks for the long post. It was great to see the detail and thought you put into this. As a fellow 88xx user it was really nice to see such appreciation for a phone I truly love.

    Look forward to seeing further posts on the subject from you. Take care and good luck.

    Posted from my CrackBerry at wapforums.crackberry.com
    11-15-08 11:10 AM
  9. FooLsKi's Avatar
    Hi r0k,

    You say that you have problems setting up your gmail IMAP, right?
    I have the same problem (and quite a few with us), and it seems to be a small 'missing feature' of the current BIS-software.
    It'll probably be fixed in the next release of the BIS-software Afaik it's only with gmail, 'coz I've seen people using different IMAP accounts. There's a small workaround (add a non-existing non-gmail account, then when the BIS asks to fill in the settings manually, change it all to gmail and it's IMAP settings) but it doesn't always work/keep working.

    Good to see you've come over to the Blackberry side
    Last edited by FooLsKi; 11-15-08 at 11:27 AM. Reason: added workaround
    11-15-08 11:24 AM
  10. tech42er's Avatar
    You have 4.2 on a Verizon phone in November 2008?! Wow, you should definitely upgrade, at LEAST to 4.3 and probably to 4.5 since it just came out officially. 4.5 has HTML e-mail, a better browser, Docs2Go, and much better memory management.

    As for the "quick phone swap" thing, how does Verizon know which phone you're switching out from? It knows the new phone is the one that dialed *228, but how does it know which phone needs to be temporarily deactivated?
    11-15-08 12:15 PM
  11. r0k's Avatar
    I'm not planning on upgrading the OS on a used (ebay) phone. I'll live with 4.2. Yeah, the browser is ugly but the phone is stable and stability is what brought me here. I hate html email. I code html in vi on unix so those links in BB email are actually nicer for me to look at.

    The way the quick phone swap works is Verizon already knows your old ESN. It learns your new ESN when you call to activate your new phone. I'm afraid to use it because I'm worried my BIS settings will all get discarded if I activate a non BB phone. It's not that big a deal to set up, but it's not something I would want to set up when I'm away from my Macbook. I need to remember to leave out the password so I can enter imap.gmail.com etc on the detail screens and the last thing I want is for my email to stop working.

    So far I'm liking my (new to me) BB 8830 a lot. It's thinner and ligher than my old Treo. And the battery life is awesome! And standby mode? And to think I was pissed that keylock was tricky when standby mode requires simply pressing and holding mute. Awesome! I've only got a handful of 3rd party apps. For me this phone is mainly a voice and email workhorse. It's gotta work, where and when I need it. If it passes that test, it's a keeper. So far so good.
    11-15-08 09:04 PM
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