blackberry

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.