Chillpilgrim

I’ve never held a blackberry device in my hand even though I worked in the the telecom industry for more than 2-3 years. But many of my colleagues have had it and they’ve never been able to put it down. My last phone, a Sony Ericsson K850i was giving me innumerable problems which to my knowledge was not fixable due to the fact that the problems were inherent and not software dependant( in which case, I would have flashed the phone and it should work like new). It came to a point where things became highly annoying and I decided to get a new phone. I sat down a made a list of all the things I needed from my phone. I divided my requirements into two categories namely Definite( The phone must have these features), Maybe( It would be nice if the phone has these, but I can get by without as well).

Definites

Call Clarity, Stability of Software, Simple and Easy Texting, Sensible Software Design, Loud Audible Ringtone, Varied profiles for varied environments

Maybe’s

Email Functionality( Work Emails), Camera( Anything over 2 MP would be good if present), Third Party Application Support, Good Connectivity with GPRS( if I’m gonna have to shell out extra money for the push email, why not GPRS too).

I surfed a lot of pages on good phones but they kept coming up with phones which were user market specific( and with good reason because thats where these companies make money). Finally I landed in Crackberry.com, a blackberry community site based out of Canada. This site convinced me that what I had so long needed was a Blackberry. I know it sounds crazy but a recent research had published that Blackberry users were even more addicted to their gadgets than Drugs. I became curious. I went ahead and exchanged my K850i for a Blackberry 8310 Curve. Its been a roller coaster ride since. Oh and did I tell you I love Roller coasters? Woooh

Well to be dead honest with you, I was completely flustered with the number of features that could exist in one device. I called up Airtel Blackberry Services Toll Free on 7070 and a guy patiently guided me through the functions and setup an account for me for 499/- The Data plan that goes with the Blackberry became active that evening and within which I had fiddled enough with the device to discover a lot more features. What I got with my Blackberry:

Making and Receiving Calls : Are an absolute dream. The Clarity is just unsurpassed so far. No unnecessary buzzes or noises. No problems there

Voice Calling Function : Press a button on the device. Say Call “name on the contact book” and it asks if I meant the contact it had pulled up. And I say YES! And it calls!! All this is loud, clear, loud speaker mode.

Searching Contacts : Type in a number and the contact shows up. Thats normal. With a BB, type in the character, C or D or E it and it brings up a list of people in your contacts book with that particular character.

Emails - Are NOT very easy to setup. But then, once you master it you really feel a intuitiveness and power of the device. It feels like they’ve thought out everything before designing it. Best thing is that you dont get a beep everytime u get a mail. I get anywhere between 100-150 mails a day and I would go crazy if my device beeped intermittently. It just flashes a red light indicating a email delivery. And I check it at leisure. Of course you can set it to beep if you want. You can set up 10 email accounts in all.

Camera - Very crisp, clear pictures with absolutely no time delay at all. Best of all, I just snap a picture, rename it on the fly and send the picture out as an email attachment which reaches the inbox of the person I send it to, in 1-2 minutes flat. Thats stability for you. If the email hasn’t reached, you have done something wrong. I’m not joking… thats how stable the device is.

Ringtones and Music- Very decent sounding tunes obviously not on par with the likes of the Sony Ericssons but the Blackberry is business device after all and it should be not be penalized for not having an equalizer functionality. Comes packed with a lot of tunes for your ringtone setting pleasure. Bonus : It has a 3.5 MM Jack, so you can your normal ipod headphones to plug in to your musical world.

Videos - Does NOT capture video, which will be fixed in the next software(v4.5) release by the Blackberry Guys, but for now plays flawless 3GP videos without any delay. Came across an Awesome site called videos4blackberry which lets you download popular american TV Shows in Blackberry Video Formats. At the moment, I never miss watching episodes of The Office(US Version) and Simpsons.

Chat - It has a  gtalk client inbuilt. I’ve also downloaded Yahoo! Messenger for BB!! Another unique aspect of the Blackberry is the Blackberry PIN Number which is unique to each device. Provided you have the PIN Number of a person using a blackberry in any part of the world, you can chat with him/her in chat conversation mode till your thumbs turn red. Another great way to meet new people and socialites. I also use the Facebook BB Application which is quite nice.

Internet Surfing - Is a dream. My wife wanted to view the rating of a film in rottentomatoes.com(which is a flash heavy site) and I was too lazy to go get my laptop and start it up. Bang! Just picked up my BB, browsed and got her the ratings in record time( less than 2 minutes).

GPS Navigation  - Again comes in very handy. Is quite fast( not as fast as I would expect) but still very very handy.

Voice Notes - I can record a podcast and just email it across to any mail address, or make it an MMS and send it a phone as a audio message.

Games - Though there are umpteen games for the Blackberry, the brickbreaker( its default game) is very very addictive. There has never been a time when I did not want to play Brickbreaker.

All is all, the Blackberry might take a little getting used to but once you’re hooked, there is NO COMING BACK. All I’m thinking of now is, how did I get by without my BB for so Long?

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