Blackberry 7290 coming up
by Volker Weber
It looks like there is a Blackberry 7290 coming up at vowe's magic flying circus. I really wonder how well this will play compared to my other devices like the Treo 650, the Nokias 9300 or 6630. Apple apparently does not sync the Blackberry through iSync, but Marco told me about PocketMac Blackberry. Is this the only game in town? What is your experience?
Comments
pocketmac blackberry works, but it is not as good as syncing the blackberry with a windows pc.
Ah, another to-be addict ;)
Oh yes, and prepare to be amazed how good the BB's are in fact as *phones*...
The Crackberry will change your life. Pocketmac works a treat, but not as good as the windows software on a PC. It syncs BB calendar and address book into iCal/Addressbook nicely.
Make sure youre running v4 software on your new blackberry as this allows you to turn email reception on and off from the handheld amongst many other things.
Are you using it with a BES server?
No. My mail is hosted on a Collax box (the artist formerly known as BenHur2): Postfix SMTP, Cyrus IMAP. BES does not know how to talk to this setup. However, my server will first scan all incoming mail for viruses, sort out the spam and then redirect the remainder to the Vodafone BB server and retain a copy in my IMAP inbox.
I don't have the BB yet, so I am testing this setup with Gmail and it works there just nicely.
I use Pocketmac BB w/ my 7100 -- it's not *bad*, but between syncing multiple Macs and my blackberry w/ the .Mac service, several contacts have gotten all jumbled up (wrong numbers or addresses for people).
The app itself isn't NEARLY as slick as iSync is, and it has a very amateur feel to it, but it gets the job done.
I loved the email push of BB. Here in the UK, O2 (the cellular provider) have a service which will query a number of POP3 accounts (5 or 10, I can't remember) and with some filtering, forward them to your device.
I struggled to see how the BB could effectively replace the Palm and a Nokia (which I used at the time) however. Couldn't justify carrying *3* things about, so it had to go.
The killer app is the push email. It doesn't *do* being a PDA nearly as well as, well, a PDA (mostly from the apps viewpoint) which is its weakest point when it comes to considering it as a successful convergence device.
If you're not a Microsoft Outlook slave, then in BB territory, you're a second class citizen, so I'm not surprised at talk of lower performance Mac solutions.
I did like it though!
