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Our resident Apple toady made a passing remark this morning to me after seeing a colleague’s new iPhone, something like this: “Hey, his iPhone’s better than your BlackBerry.” Now, my BlackBerry is about three years old, nowhere near top-of-the-line, yet that horribly biased statement got me thinking. After all, it’s undeniable that the iPhone’s Mac OS X-based environment is slicker and prettier than the BlackBerry’s rather austere JAVA environment. But the point of a smartphone is, for lack of a better word, to be smart, and the BlackBerry still does a better job.

It boils down to one thing above all else, beyond the minor problems like no expansion slots and no one-touch phone dialing (the other half of ’smartphone’): no 3rd-party apps. Apple, as has always been their hallmark, wants to keep everything in-house, so we get a phone that shows Youtube, but not Flash-based content on the bundled Safari browser. And, we get a phone that can do barely a tenth of what my JAVA-based phone can. Here’s what my BlackBerry can do right now that the iPhone will never be able to do:

1. S/FTP access
2. Remote Desktop access
3. VNC access
4. SSH
5. Opera Mini browser
6. SharkModem tethered modem software

The list goes on, but the point is that RIM made a good decision to go with a technology that was demonstrating itself both universal and capable of being deployed on handheld devices. All of the apps I’ve mentioned are 3rd-party, and I’m not counting gadgets like Gmail which may be on both phones. Apple decided to keep everything tightly under wraps, and now they’ve delivered a phone that’s glitzy and slick, but also inherently limited in scope. And that’s why the BlackBerry line is still better.

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…at least sort of. By going to http://m.google.com/a on your BlackBerry, you can download an interesting approximation of Google Apps, called Mail by Google. This mysterious program is separate from the mobile Gmail app you can also download from Google, and allows you to access mail for your group or organization that has a Google Apps account. It uses the same interface as the mobile Gmail app, so it’s a bit slow, but completely adequate. It still lacks a logout feature, however, which makes logging into multiple Gmail or Google App mail a real pain.

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Idokorro’s Mobile File Manager - FTP/SFTP software for the Blackberry

It’s probably no surprise that the people at Idokorro came up with a solution to access your website or other FTP server from a Blackberry-after all, their suite of Blackberry apps includes a remote desktop / VNC client as well as a mobile server admin program. But Mobile File Manager, the FTP/SFTP app, might be the best of all. It’s easy to use, and fast (about a 5 second wait for each directory tree). The interface is clear and easy to read. It sells for $35 (volume discounts available for the corporate world), and it seems to be well worth the price.
Of course, if you already own Mobishark’s Sharkmodem software (reviewed previously on this blog), you can also use that to connect to your FTP site, through a standard FTP client. Just set the proxy for 127.0.0.1 with port 3128, and Sharkmodem will establish a secure socket connection to your FTP server so that you can upload and download files. If you can’t control the timeout, though, beware–file download is slow (.5KBps), so you can’t get much more than 30KB for every minute of your timeout. The auto-timeout on the FTP server I log into is 3 minutes, so my limit is around 100KB for download/upload.

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Google Maps are now available for a wide variety of mobile phones.

A couple of weeks ago, while preparing to slog through an almost impossible-to-read map on my Blackberry to find directions, I discovered that Google has made a mobile version of their map software available to Java-enabled handheld devices, including my Blackberry 7130e. For a full list of supported devices, visit this page. The software is pretty easy to use: just type in an address or business type, and the map will show you where it is and/or how to get there from where you tell it you are. It is undeniably neat to navigate to, say, Sandusky, Ohio and ask Google to show you all the pizza places in town, even if you’re nowhere near Sandusky, Ohio.

The interface is obviously much better, since it’s designed for the tiny screen of your phone or PDA, not a computer monitor (my Blackberry was capable of using the Google Maps page beforehand, but it took forever and was very unwieldy). You can save favorite locations or searches, and zoom in and out quickly and easily. In fact, my only complaint is that, while the software offers both a road map and a satellite view, you cannot overlay the two as you can on real Google Maps. Other than that, though, this is a worthy download for your phone. Just visit mobile.google.com on your phone’s web browser to get the app.

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The Blackberry 7100x. Source: www.mobilegazette.com

Ok, I’m fairly certain the Blackberry doesn’t provide any simple way for people to transfer their mp3s into it for the purpose of being ringtones. So, either you’re limited to whatever tasteless drivel your wireless provider deems most profitable, or you can work around the stupidity.

Now, I love Shakira and all, but with my provider, Verizon, I couldn’t even find where to buy mp3 ring tones, so I was left instead with a meager selection of free MIDI crap. It was time to work around the stupidity.

For this recipe, you’ll need some web space. There’s plenty of ways to get that for free, mostly involving allowing the hosting service to cover 90% of the screen with their branded crapola. Or, consider that a domain and hosting for a month at godaddy.com can run you as low as $10, and offers the prospect of loading unlimited mp3s on your phone, and the investment starts to sound pretty good.

Anyways, once you’ve got your web space, all you have to do is create a nice, simple HTML page. Here’s some help, in case your normal OS is Etch-a-sketch:

Now, here’s the key. You need to put the mp3 on your web space as well, and it’s also wise to name it the same thing as you’re referencing in your HyperText Markup Language. If links confuse you, just make sure to put the file in the same folder as the .html file, then put the name of the file between quotes after the a href part.

Now, go to your newly created page (name it something short like bb.htm–it will become obvious why when your giant fingers try to type in the URL on that tiny keyboard). Select the link and open it on your blackberry, and voila! Your PDA downloads the file, saves it into the Tunes folder, and you can make it a ringtone or play it to annoy your friends. Unless you get an error like the following: HTTP Request failed: Item too large. Then, it’s time to go back and edit down your mp3, because it’s obviously over 500 kilobytes in size. That’s right, you can’t request an object much larger than that, so you’re SOL if you can’t get your file smaller than that.

So, you ask, how do I do that? Well, the first step is Audacity, the free audio-editing software that packs a serious punch, runs stably, and must therefore have been programmed by the nicest, bestest people on Earth. Once you’ve got that downloaded, follow the included instructions on obtaining the LAME mp3 encoding codec, or any other mp3 codec you want to use. The Blackberry doesn’t much like songs encoded under 32kbps, but even so, you can get almost 2 minutes of audio in under 500k at that bitrate, and by fiddling with stereo/mono settings, you might get even more. Remember, if you wanted something that could play real, whole songs longer than 2:00 long, you should’ve gotten a Treo. And if your $500 Blackberry left you too poor for another ‘smartphone‘ or an iPod, just learn to love punk rock.

The Blackberry: Sweet, juicy….Internet.

As PDAs and similar handheld devices continue to advance, it becomes more and more realistic to consider them in one’s site design, in order to reach the widest audience possible. Since I happen to have a Blackberry right now, I’ve been trying various sites in order to see what’s compatible and what fails miserably.

The usual suspects, such as Google and Gmail, performed flawlessly, as expected. The folks over at Google seem to a have a special little spot in their hearts for the mobile user, and their most popular offerings don’t disappoint in this regard.

Once I was sure that I’d maxed out my PDA’s capability to process client-side markup and scripting (you have to manually add JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and XML support, otherwise you’re basically running Internet Explorer 4.0 on a teeny-tiny screen–a browsing experience that would make even the most desperate bsuite-hound run for the nearest Mennonite community), I headed over to this blog.

The front page loaded flawlessly, though it takes quite a while, and the Blackberry’s status bar indicates a laborious process of running scripts and proccessing CSS at what is, relatively, a snail’s pace. What surprised me the most was the appearance of a photo that went with one of the stories, nicely formatted and filling the screen. It’s easy to scroll through and read posts, click on related articles, and do pretty much anything else you’d want.

With the front page test complete, I tried logging in to the admin section. Navigating to /wp-admin yielded a standard userID/password dialog, and within 30 seconds, I was on the admin dashboard, free to click on any tab, change any options I wanted, and even post an article. As far as I can tell, WP works with the Blackberry, or rather, the Blackberry has no problems handling WordPress. It’s a far cry from the cell-phone internet I’m used to.

I plan to continue trying out sites to see where the Blackberry might get stuck. I’ll post if I find anything, and update this entry if I find any more significant sites or webapps that work.

UPDATE: I found a page with a really nice intro to CSS and web development on the Blackberry. Read about it here.