Goodbye Palm, Hello Blackberry!

[Matt J]

Well, I finally did it, I switched over from a Treo 680 to a Blackberry Bold 9000! After using CompanionLink to sync with Google Calendar, I imported all my contacts and calendar to the Bold. Setting up GMail was a breeze...

I've only played with it for a few hours, and it will take some getting used to, but everything seems to work well. The screen is beautiful and its ability to switch between 3G and Wi-Fi flawless. The GPS works nice with Google Maps.

I heard that the Blackberry browser was not so hot, but I actually like it better than Opera Mini in my short time using it. Time will tell. The build quality is amazing. It just feels solid and expensive.

[Hook]

Congratulations, Matt. BBs take a lot of flack for the same reason as WinMo and other things do... the criticism is from years ago. BBs have improved greatly over the past couple of years.

You'll have fun with your new device, I'm sure.

[Matt J]

I got up this morning with a full charge... knowing me... I will be doing some pretty heavy use. I will report on the battery capabilities.

[Hook]

You'll be very pleasantly surprised. My Nokia gets great battery life (2 days without recharging), but no one can touch BBs on battery management.

[Mi An]

I saw a BB bold screen IRL once, it was great looking.

And wasn't it a Bold that someone from the audience handed to a Palm guy when he was demoing the Pre at an electronics conference and he wanted to show off how great its screen was, and when they handed him that, he was like "oh...".

[Matt J]

I saw a BB bold screen IRL once, it was great looking.

And wasn't it a Bold that someone from the audience handed to a Palm guy when he was demoing the Pre at an electronics conference and he wanted to show off how great its screen was, and when they handed him that, he was like "oh...".

Now that I have had the Bold for 24 hours, I can honestly say that I have never, ever seen a better screen and better color. Not even the iPhone comes close in color saturation, clarity and density.

The Bold is fast, fast, fast. No lag, anywhere.

More to follow.

[r0k]

Matt, I saw this thread yesterday when I was in the midst of email outage that seemed to be caused by RIM. It wasn't RIM. It was gmail. Today, I've dropped gmail and I'm using my mobile me account. Guess what? Gmail started working again. Well hoo hoo. For two outages in 2 days, it's already out to pasture. I haven't deleted my account or anything but I've set my BB up to check my mail at mobile me and if gmail is down I still get my email. Perhaps in a week or two, when I'm sick of seeing email twice, I'll break my gmail account on purpose so it no longer pushes to my BB and I'll let mobile me do it all. I like gmail's smam filter better than the mome spam filter but Apple answers the phone when I call, Google only wants to know how many billion in advertising I want to buy. No thanks.

So now that the air is clear and I realize it wasn't RIM's fault, I can come here and offer a heart felt congratulations on picking a winning platform. There is one thing I learned over the last few days that might be of help, though. BB is email centric. This means if you set up an email account, then create a few hundred calendar events, then delete that email account, all those events become orphans and BB doesn't quite know how to handle them. It can't seem to sync them any more. It still shows them in the calendar on the phone but they are really stepchildren of your calendar in some sort of calendar limbo. Be very careful what email provider you pick. If there is an outage, you might have a hassle changing email accounts.

There is an account that comes with your BB, but like most free provider accounts, I chose to pass because it was associated with a particular carrier and phone. I prefer some provider, whether it's Apple, hotmail, gmail, yahoo, anything but an ISP that when I stop paying my bill, my account goes away. Actually, Apple is an exception. If I stop paying my mome bills, my data will go away.

I hated the trackwheels and trackballs when I first saw them. I love the trackball now. It will get dirty from time to time. Check out youtube for a tutorial on how to clean your BB trackball. It's easy and you might need to do it as often as quarterly and as infrequenly as once a year. I was delighted to be rid of the touchscreen at first. Now that I carry a BB and an iPod touch, I must admit, I'd consider a touchscreen phone. The Storm 2 and the Pre are both phones that interest me. I'm also interested in iPhone, but only on Verizon as long as I still live in SE Michigan. So enjoy your new Bold. It's a great phone. BTW, you might want to get an account over at Crackberry. You'll get answers to blackberry questions a lot faster over there if you're in a hurry. Of course I stick around here because I like it here but I do find my BB related tech questions often get answered over there in minutes versus days or longer here.

[Matt J]

The Bold can take some heavy, heavy use and make it well through the day without a recharge. Since it's my new toy, I have been playing with it non-stop and using a lot of Wi-Fi at home to download apps and stuff. My Treo 680 certainly could not have made it through the day.

I suspect that the Bold is good for 3-4 days of average use (i.e. e-mail, text, PIM's and calls).

The keyboard is excellent.

[sjweise]

I can run the battery down in a day on my Curve, but that is with web and email/message usage all day and Wifi at home (mornings and evenings). I actually don't talk too much on my phone, so I can't attest to talk time usage.

[Matt J]

I can run the battery down in a day on my Curve, but that is with web and email/message usage all day and Wifi at home (mornings and evenings). I actually don't talk too much on my phone, so I can't attest to talk time usage.

I get up early (i.e. 5 or 6 a.m.) on a fully charged battery. While at home for a few hours I have my Wi-Fi on. Assuming an e-mail or two per hour throughout the day, a few SMS's, some BB Messenger, 2 or 3 phone calls or so, some web browsing (say 20 minutes/day), lots and lots of Calendar lookups, some Memo Pad and Task List, and just general use stuff such as checking the weather, etc... the odd playing with the GPS (I'm fascinated) and maybe some games to relax (20 minutes) and maybe 10-15 minutes of music.

Based on this usage pattern, my BB is well over 60% by 11:00 p.m. I figure I could go two or three days if I only did productive things on it that I really only would need to do.

Much better than I am used to with my Treo 680.