My Boost Mobile Motorola i855 recently died and I picked up an old Blackberry 7100i for $35 on eBay to replace it. This is my first Blackberry so I needed plenty of help in figuring out to set it up to synchronize with Outlook and to find and load compatible applications. Fortunately there are a huge number of BlackBerry resources on the net. A little Googling and I found everything I needed. My contacts, calendar and notes are now synchronized and I have Opera Mini 4.1, Google Maps and several other apps running. The phone is a bit of a brick but it’s great to finally have an iDen phone that can run the latest Google Maps smoothly and has Outlook synchronization and copy/paste.
In the process of figuring out my new toy I found a couple of Blackberry specific mobile forums which I’ve added to the Technology/Mobile/Smartphones/BlackBerry section of WapReview Directory and Yeswap.com mobile portal.
BlackBerryForums is one of the most popular of the dedicated BlackBerry user forums as well as one of the few with a mobile formatted edition (wap.blackberryforums.com). With over a million posts and 200,000+ registered users, the five year old site is a incredible resource for users of the popular email oriented smartphone.
BlackBerryForums Mobile uses the popular WiForums add-on, which works with a variety of popular PHP based forum software including vBulletin which is what BlackBerryForums uses. The version of WiForums used is quite slick. There’s a a fully functional search to quickly find what you are looking for among those million posts. WiForums is highly configurable, using the “My Prefs” option on the home screen you can turn images in posts on and off (beware that images are not re-sized), set the number of posts and threads per page and the number of search results returned.
Registration is not required to browse the mobile edition of BlackBerryForums but only registed users can post, update their preferences and download files hosted on the site. You can register right on the mobile site, which I recommend as the registration form on BlackBerryReview’s full site has one of the most hellish CAPTCAs I’ve ever used.
Mobile Link: wap.blackberryforums.com
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Filed In: Technology/Mobile/Smartphones/BlackBerry
The forums at the BB news site EverythingBerry are not nearly as large as BlackBerryForums but they are useful The main news blog section of EverythingBerry doesn’t seem to be mobile formatted, but the forums at everythingberry.com/forum are. There is no dedicated mobile URL, mobile browsers should automatically receive the mobile version of the site.
Like BlackBerryForums, EverythingBerry Mobile uses the vBulletin forum software, but the mobile edition is created with a vBulletin theme instead of WiForums. The theme works well, images can be turned off and page sizes are under 20KB without images, ideal for mobile. There is no search and options are limited to toggling images, signatures, avatars and threading and changing the sort order of posts. A minor usability issue is that the main menu uses an almost unreadable combination of dark blue text on a black background.
Mobile Link: everythingberry.com/forum
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Filed In: Technology/Mobile/Smartphones/BlackBerry
Please leave a comment if you know of any other BlackBerry oriented mobile web sites that I can add to the BlackBerry Section of the Wapreview Mobile Web Directory
I call it the “SHITBERRY”
1) Even with the keypad locked when placed in my pocket it frequently spontaneously dials 911.
2) The “holster” is poorly designed and easily comes off my belt, requiring me to backtrack and search for the lost shitberry. A simple piece of velcro to secure the bottom of this would fix the problem, but the shitberry engineers aren’t even up to that.
3) They want $35/mo. just to give basic text and picture messaging capability which is free for a normal cell phone.
That’s why I call it the “shitberry” – one of the worst decisions I made in 2008.
Warner.