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Russell Mickler, Principal Consultant, has over 17 years of professional experience leading and managing IT organizations.
Seven Great BlackBerry Applications
Written on January 10, 2009
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Here’s some free (or nearly free) applications that I’ve got on my BlackBerry.
WeatherEye. An excellent weather application that shows the forecase in 8 hour, daily, and weekly increments. It has a nice menuing system and you can customize its locality. It even changes the icon on the BlackBerry desktop to reflect the weather for current conditions.
TellMe. A Microsoft product that leverages MSN, this tool allows you to look up the names and addresses of businesses, but it can also look them up by category. So, if you’re looking for “pizza”, for example, it will return pizza restaurants. If you’re looking for “movies”, showtimes and movie theaters are returned. If you’re looking for “stocks”, you can enter the company name and get its history and changes including the summary chart. Also, TellMe’s interface can also use voice recognition – you can say what you’re looking for and it interprets the entry pretty well. A nice application for the price: totally free.
Yahoo! Mobile. The Yahoo! Messenger allows you to keep in touch with your IM buddies from the Yahoo! network. It’s a pleasant interface and seemlessly integrates with the BlackBerry’s native messanging system. You can turn the IM on and off, and setup status messages while you’re unavailable.
OperaMini. An alternative to the native BlackBerry browser, OperaMini is a great application. It allows you to view websites in desktop mode and mobile mode; I find Opera easier to read than the native browser although a little clunky on data entry – usually requiring Opera to accept the data input in a separate page before it’s submitted. If you’re looking for an alternative to the native browser, give this one a try.
MileageManager. This is a commercial application that I use to track my mileage. It allows you to record mileage with a lot of the details (date, time, mileage rates, categories) already filled in. Once you’re ready, you can then export the database to an email account as a *.csv attachment. If I recall, I paid less than $10 for it… it’s a great little application for what it does.
Google Mobile Apps, Google Maps, and Gmail. Google has a fantastic suite of free applications that are a “must have”. The Maps application from Google is far superior to the native maps application and is GPS aware; the Gmail applet allows you to manage your Gmail account in real time using a local application instead of a web browser. And Mobile Apps puts the search engine at your fingertips using a local interface to the BlackBerry as well. Despite Google’s commitment to Android, Google’s attention to detail on these applications for the BlackBerry really provides really powerful capability.
TwitterBerry. If you’re a Twitter fan, this is the application you’ve been waiting for. A nice local interface to review Tweets from your friends and add your own.
All of these applications are tools that I use daily and expand my BlackBerry experience. What other tools do you think I should have in this list that are valuable to you?