Notes on BlackBerry 8100 ownership: Russell Hanson Nov. 15--Nov. 18 (edit), 2006 I own a blackberry 8100 pearl and here is an account of some things I've found useful to know about this device that I was unable to ascertain from the documents I found on the web before purchasing one or that I've found out through my own use. Briefly, how I came to buy one after comparing devices on the market: I needed a new cellphone, really, and was on the market for a smartphone, since they seemed to offer more and the motorola Q had come out. Initially I thought the Palm Treo 650 or 700p (palm os) or 700w (windows mobile) would be more to my liking. Specifically I'd never owned a Palm and wanted to play around with the stylus thing, especially the WiFi Palms, while I'm stuck in endless meetings etc. However I visited my local palm store and played around with the devices and they didn't seem like something I wanted to carry around with me really, for superficial aesthetic reasons. Also I balked at the $400 price tag. However, I had seen an ad where J&R Music World was offering a Treo 650 for $130. This was in my price range for the device, but I never figured out how much the service costs. I visited the T-Mobile store after looking on Amazon for the BB Pearl and saw that the unlimited data plan is $20/mo and that the phone is free and made my purchase. Price/Feature Comparisons: BlackBerry Pearl 8100: 312 MHz Intel. XScale. cellular processor with 64 MB flash memory T-Mobile BlackBerry data plan is $20/mo unlimited Verizon Motorola Q: 10MB/mo data plan $29.99; $49.99 unlimited Intel Bulverde 312 MHz Cingular Treos: unlimited web and email $39.99; $49.99 includes 1000 text, video, or picture messages Intel PXA270 312 MHz processor Cingular Samsung i607 BlackJack: plan is same as Cing. Treo, $74.99 device Processor 220 MHz; Maker? (anyone opened one of these up?) Another document on the web with helpful tips, hints, and links: http://home.comcast.net/~tamsterra/Blackberry_8100_Pearl_Tips.pdf (mirror: http://hansonr.org/web/Blackberry_8100_Pearl_Tips-07-05-04-DL.pdf) Pictures of a disassembled device: http://www.blackberryforums.com/general-8100-series-discussion/48123-8100-pics-inside-out-after-toilet-bath.html Weird cool things: A flash! I never thought I wanted a personal hour-by-hour organizer, but I do! Try using a stylus-based PDA with one hand, I dare you. Trouble-shooting: If you didn't pay your bill you have to re-send your email accounts to the BB using the T-Mobile "resend accounts to device" button on the my.t-mobile.com page. Accessories I've purchased: MicroSD (NOT MiniSD) 1GB -- the cheapest one on pricewatch. Seidio 2.5mm to 3.5mm adaptor ($15.95) part# and link: http://www.seidioonline.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=300 Accessories not purchased: Sanyo 2.5mm Male to 3.5mm Female Headphone Audio Adapter Converter with MIC for Sanyo MM-8300 (http://www.tangshop.com/sanyo-mm-8300-accessories-25mm-35mm-audio-jack-adaptor-mic.html) this one has the advantage of a longer cord between the 2.5mm phone end and the microphone, so you don't have to hold the phone to your mouth when you speak, it has a clip on the mic and also a similar button to switch the mic on and off. I tend to carry the short Seidio adaptor connected to a pair of stereo headphones and the extra length of cord on this Sanyo would I think make it too long. Settings I find indispensable enough to post here: - Turn off vibrate notification for incoming email messages (don't want your phone vibrating every 2-3 minutes). Profiles/Advanced/Vibrate/Select your emails account(s) set notification for holster and non-holster to None. - The phantom theme is pretty cool. Email: There is an awesome BB-native application for gmail.com if you use gmail. Go to the gmail site for OTA download and download it. This app doesn't appear to support unicode however and Cyrillic gets garbled (the native browser supports Cyrillic fine, but I have been trying to get it do display Chinese, and haven't really succeeded yet). Music: I had read somewhere that the music player was disabled to scan mp3 files, i.e. move forward and backward in the same file. This is not the case, by scrolling up with the scroll-ball you can go to the position slider and click and then move in increments of ~7 seconds for a five minute mp3 or some larger amount as a percentage for longer audio files to the desired location in your music or audio file. There is a clicking noise between tracks under most circumstances that is not present on a "classic" Apple Rev. 3 iPod. Video: mplayer (.hu) and "Super C" (.fr) movie codec allow encoding in the weird for-video-streaming format the is the native video player format from native .avi format or .mpg format (Link: http://blackberryforums.pinstack.com/6948-original_video_encoding_8100_a.html) Still haven't figured out how to take movies on the phone?? The Treo does this and I imagine the Motorola Q does as well. This may be impossible currently. Phone: Speaker quality is inferior to the free Samsung phones at the T-Mobile store. Addressbook is pretty cool. Correction to the 8100 manual for SIM importing all from SIM to addressbook: it's not on the menu it says, it is on the other, when you press the menu key on the individual item, it says something different from what the manual says, and is on _a different menu_ from the one where you import a single contact from the SIM card. (Manual Link: http://www.engadget.com/videos/8100UserGuide.pdf 597 KB) Software: PDF-viewer: - DocHawk sucks - Alternatives? - I haven't fronted the money for the BB Office suite, eh, which costs many times the price of the actual device - bbLocal relies on wap tcp/ip which sucks (you access wap through wap.voicestream.com, Link: http://www.tinyscreenfuls.com/2004/12/t-mobile-network-change-cuts-off-blackberry-users/) - Opera mini doesn't have the shortcut keys mapped properly for the BB keyboard and as such is mostly useless. Rebuilding the app to incorporate the otherwise built-in smartkeys is probably prohibitive for most users, though it is certainly possible. I don't know if javascript works using "Operetta". - ABC Amber BlackBerry Converter v4.06 convert the blackberry database dump semi-database file to a variety of other proprietary formats (Palm, Outlook, etc.). Backup the Calendar to Text, Contacts to/from MS Outlook. There are tons of free, and java-based PDF viewers out there and I have friends who've coded them, and they say it amounts to following the data structure to a bitmap and then displaying the bitmap. Why hasn't this been done for the BB OS yet? GPS: Need external GPS that is subsequently paired via bluetooth pairing. I haven't looked into what item/part this is exactly, the Treo one seemed absurd for anything other than installing in the family mini-van, unless you want to mount a GPS on your, um, abdomen. Maps: Like the Gmail email client, there exists a native BB 8100 Google Maps app. The speed and power of this app make having an external GPS for road navigation almost irrelevant since few are the cases when you don't know the intersection of the two roads you are at. Really, this is sweet, and the speed of the rendering, complete with satellite and hybrid images, make my laptop look slow. There is no option on the application menu to put the "G"-maps in the background while it is open, as there are in other apps (i.e. media player). I hope this gets added in the next revision. However, you can force it into the background by hitting the green call button. This is useful if you are in the middle of navigating point-by-point, turn-by-turn, and want to use the phone, for instance, without restarting the navigation pattern from the beginning. BB OS: If your BB crashes and says it can't find the rim_os you have to wipe the BB with the desktop manager software and by wiping I mean I hope you backed up your custom addressbook with all your friends' email addresses you painstakingly keyed in with your one-handed-BB-keyboard-operating--know-how. The OS you reload will be different from the one supplied by T-Mobile, in particular the load all SIM card entires to the addressbook instructions given in the manual will be correct. Be sure to correctly select the OS for BIS (i.e. not enterprise) or enterprise versions, otherwise you will have to wipe it again. I think this happened when I took the battery out without shutting the thing down, on my previous phone this wasn't a problem because you couldn't corrupt the firmware--don't remove the battery without turning it off from the front panel or you may corrupt your OS. Applications that I would use but haven't found yet: - A pdf viewer that is spawned from the BB browser. - A timer/alarm, there is no timer, but there is a software group that has coded this and has it for sale for $19.00, again, more than I paid for the device. BB distributes an IDE and API that make this kind of thing very very simple. An O'Reilly Hacks series book, BlackBerry Hacks (October 2005): http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/blackberryhks/ Book pretty much sucks. I read it, it was out-of-date before it was published. It has one of a few comprehensible descriptions of software development on the BB though, and has a walk-through of how to make a Java stock-ticker app. Also introduces the BB emulator, which is what one would actually use as a development environment.