From my earlier post, I’ve taken Ross Mayfield’s advice and gone for a Blackberry 8700 from Vodafone, rather than HP iPaq or an SE 990i. Vodafone finally got the 8700v in stock on Wednesday, so it arrived late yesterday. I’ve only been using it for a few hours, and I already understand why they call it the Crackberry. The 8700v is an absolutely excellent little device, and the user interface is very addictive. I’m replacing a Treo 90 PDA, which I use for my calendar, address book, actions, pictures of the family and note taking on the road, as well as a Sony Ericsson K700i phone. I wanted to avoid this phenomenon of Blackberry users who also carry a phone (Ross even suggested that!). Although the 8700v doesn’t have a camera, and isn’t intended to be particularly game or MP3 friendly, it handles all of the things I need. I wanted the full Qwerty keyboard as I’ve always been used to that with my Psion Revo, and then the Treo 90. It means I can type SMS and email much more easily than with these smart text capable phones. Apart from combining phone and PDA for convenience, the main reason for moving to a Blackberry (or the others) is the always on, push e-mail, which I need to stay in touch with my business.
Set up of the phone was easy. Vodafone’s technical helpline gave me great support when I needed it (because my account hadn’t been data enabled), and getting my data on to the phone worked without hassles. I use a slightly esoteric PIM on my desktop called Time & Chaos (from Chaos software). It’s the only contact manager I’ve found where I can have calendar, appointments, tasks and contacts on one manageable screen, and is much easier to use than Outlook. However, Outlook is the de facto standard, and for me a good conduit. I’ve got the software to synchronise T&C with Outlook, and the Blackberry comes with software to synchronise it to Outlook, Lotus Notes and a few other products. Now it’s a two step process to synchronise the calendar and all my notes to the Blackberry, but it’s no hassle, fast, and both synchronise products have excellent options to map the fields you want. This approach will also work in nicely with the hosted CRM we are just implementing, which will also synchronise with Outlook for off-line use. With Blackberry Internet Service you can get e-mails from up to 10 accounts pushed to your phone. Set up of my various POP3 e-mail accounts was easy too.
However, the key to the Blackberry advantage (and the Crackberry nickname) is the seductiveness of the user interface. You quickly get used to getting around on the PDA with the click wheel and back button, and you can do it one handed, rather than almost always needing to use the stylus, as you do on the Palm OS. I thought I’d miss the touch screen, but I don’t. When you do click to do something, you generally have all of the options you would want in one place, and so the number of scrolls and clicks to do stuff is kept to a minimum. The system also senses the most likely thing you want to do next. For example, if you are scrolling through an e-mail and get to a phone number and click, the system knows you probably want to call it. When you get to an e-mail and click, you’ll want to e-mail next. Some of the best features are slick shortcuts that you can find in the documentation, or on the various Blackberry forums and communities like Blackberrycool. The Blackberry OS is a much more integrated tool than the alternatives, and the subtle simplicity of the way it works has made me an instant fan.
So I’m missing a few bells and whistles, but I can tell already that this thing is going to increase my productivity, make me more likely to use SMS where appropriate, and help me stay connected, and that’s what counts. I wonder what treatment you can get for the addiction?
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