Ricky Says

Just traded in your Blackberry for a shiny new iPhone? Wise choice.

Here's how to transfer contacts from your old Blackberry to your new iPhone, and without buying anything extra along the way (completely free solution).

We'll do this in two main steps:

1. Transfer contacts from the Blackberry address book to Outlook on your computer (or Windows Mail).

2. Sync your iPhone with your computer using iTunes, which will transfer the contacts from Outlook to your iPhone.

Make sure that both the Blackberry Desktop Manager and iTunes are installed on your system, and that your Blackberry is connected to your computer with a usb data cable.

Transfer contacts from a Blackberry to Outlook

Run the Blackberry Desktop Manager program and click "Synchronize" from the main menu screen. Select "Synchronization" below the Configuration menu option to get to the Synchronization Configuration screen.

There you'll click the "Synchronization" button to configure the synchronization settings.

(that was a mouthfull of synch-related words wasn't it? Hang in there)

You'll be asked to choose the device applications to synchronize. Choose "Address Book", and then choose "Outlook".

If you don't have Outlook on your system, then you can choose "Windows Mail" instead.

Next you'll configure how you want to sync your contacts, either bi-directionally or just from your blackberry to Outlook (which is the option I chose):

Click "Next" and then "Finish" to complete the synchronization settings. This will take you back to the synchronization screen.

Question: I keep getting duplicate emails on my Blackberry Curve 8310, and it seems to be only messages that I reply to (where the original message will show up again after I reply to it, even if it was received several weeks ago). Is there a way to turn this off?

Answer: The trick for turning off duplicate emails was to switch the account type to use my company's outlook web mail address instead of integrating directly with the exchange server.

Basically I logged into the Blackberry email account setup screen and deleted my existing email account, and then created a new one that used the same web address that I use when I log into Outlook with the web client.

The devil is in the details however, and here are the tricks I used to create a blackberry email account that used my company's outlook web address instead of exchange.

First, I logged into the blackberry internet service page (http://att.blackberry.com for me since I'm with AT&T), and then deleted the account that I had set up.

Next, I created a new account using test@test.com (or some bogus email address that the service won't be able to find. This is necessary because it won't show you the super advanced account configuration options unless it can't connect to your mail server, so this fakes it out).

I feel obliged to reply to my own post title "Apple Drops iPhone Price to $199 and Converts Blackberry Fans", and let you know that I decided to actually stick with the Blackberry.

It turned out that I'm not eligible for the upgrade price because I bought my BB less than a year ago and signed up for a 2 year contract with AT&T. So the new iPhone 3G would have cost me $399 for the 8GB model and $499 for the 16GB model - and I just can't justify that much money for a phone and web browser.

Also, reports of the 3G's fast internet speed indicate that it comes at the price of battery life - spent in as little as 2 hours! I can easily go for 2 days on a single charge with my Curver, and I'm not enthused about the prospects of having to plug an iPhone in for charging every few hours.

Fortunately RIM will be releasing the Blackberry Bold very soon in 2008 and it claims to have 3G speed - so I'll keep my eyes on that one instead, and I still use my Curve around the clock for web browsing, email, texting, twitter, taking pictures, listening to music, and finding my location on Google maps.

So it's all still very good in Blackberry land, and I know you want one of those t-shirts ;-)

Question: I have My Portfolio set up at iGoogle and can see it fine on a PC. But when I go to iGoogle using my Blackberry it does not show up - everything else on the iGoogle home page I have does. How can I see My Portfolio? (I used to have it at my Excite homepage but they no longer offer that service of showing your personal portfolio.

Answer: The default web browser that comes with Blackberry mobile phones is just "ok", but not great. It doesn't do a very good job of showing complex web pages, and usually strips them down to a more mobile-friendly smaller screen size.

Opera has a web browser that's completely free called Opera Mini, that runs quite a bit better on a wide variety of phones. It lets you view web pages in full view, and let's you zoom in on the areas that you want to see.

Here's the iGoogle page in full screen view:

Notice the rectangle on the screen? That's the zoom viewfinder, and watch how it zooms into that area of the screen when I click the scroll button:

Question: I occasionally want to take a picture of my Blackberry screen to explain to friends or coworkers how to do something on the phone, or to show them what a game looks like. Is this possible?

Answer: Yes, it's possible to take screen shots of your Blackberry device using a free program called BBScreenShooter.

You can even take psuedo-video of your Blackberry screen with the BBScreenStream program that takes snapshots every half second or so in a continuous loop - similar to video surveillance cameras.

You'll need the javaloader.exe that comes with the Blackberry development kit, which you can get from Motorola. The dev kit is a huge download though, which seems overkill for just one file - so I stuffed it in my downloads folder and you can get JavaLoader.exe here without having to download the whole dev kit.

Place JavaLoader.exe and bbscreenshooter.exe in the same folder, and then double-click bbscreenshooter.exe to run the application.