The Rabapab Blog

You see them everywhere.  At work, at school and everywhere in between, the Blackberry has become a social norm.  When you got that first cell phone, just having one was cool.  You could make a phone call without needing to dig a quarter out of your pocket, and find a payphone.  Then they started putting color screens on them, and using the phone to browse mobile sites became possible.  Then people started combining phones with PDA’s and they turned into Smart Phones.  Now you could keep all of your organizer data (ie. Calendar, Tasks, Notes) in the same device as your phone. 

I had always had regular old cell phones, my first one was a Nokia, got it from the now history Cellular One.  Then I had a Motorola flip phone, then another Motorola flip phone with a color screen, then a Motorola Razor (also a flip phone).  Then I decided that I wanted to move on to a Smartphone.  I did not want to spend the money to buy an iPhone as they had just come out.  I decided on a Samnsung Blackjack II from AT&T, as I was already a customer with them.  The phone was quite a leap from my old Razor, I mean the damn thing had a full qwerty keyboard on it.  Surprisingly the phone was not all that large, there were certainly bigger phones out there at the time, but it was larger than any of my previous phones.  The Blackjack is a Windows Mobile device, which fit my wishes at the time.  I was and still am a big Microsoft fan, they make good products that interact seamlessly.  That phone really got me started on Smartphones, and I don’t think I could go back to regular cell phones ever again.

Then I decided to switch to Verizon Wireless, mainly because I wanted to get the Blackberry Storm.  The Storm is the touchscreen Blackberry that is exclusive with VZW.  I had been reading a lot about them since before the phone was released.  It had been out for about a month, and I went into the store and got all setup with one.  Now let me tell you, as it stands my experience with Blackberries at that point had been very little and only by playing with other peoples.  In my opinion that helped me appreciate the Storm that much more when I started using it.  I was quickly able to start typing on it, no matter which keyboard I was using.  I quickly became addicted to Crackberry.com, whch is quite possibly my most visited site at this point.  There is a lot of good information there and as a new Blackberry user it became my resource for everything I wanted to know about my new toy.  The Blackberry’s ability to do push email is quite possibly the greatest thing I think I have ever seen.  As soon as the email hits the inbox of the 4 email addresses I have going to it, the message immediately appears on my phone.  I have all my IM clients that I use always logged in on my phone, so I am always available for a chat with my friends.  With the help of the CrackBerry forums I have jumped into the land of Beta OS installs and 3rd Party Applications.  I have installed numerous Beta OS’s on my phone, each one making the phone just a little bit better.  Right now I am running what is called a Hybrid OS, it combines parts of a few different Beta OS’s.  My phone has Google Maps, Viigo, Where, Poynt, TalkLock, Flickr, Quicklaunch, Quickpull and Tiltris installed.  These are all 3rd Party apps that I have installed and have been playing with.  Each app provides different features or services that are very useful.   

My Crackberry addiction has even ventured into the realm of Paid Applications, in other words they cost money.  I already mentioned Quicklaunch, which is quite possibly the greatest app possible for the Storm.  It gives you a scrollable menu that you can customize and is able to launch pretty much any application that you may have installed.  Kind of like a Start Menu.  I also recently purchased a few themes that I had found reviewed on Crackberry.com, one is called Streamline and the other is Today Plus Hidden.  So far they seem like wonderful themes, I am certainly hoping that the authors release updates for them.  Themes are kind of new area for the Storm as the application needed to create themes was just recently released.  The app, called Plazmic 4.7, is currently still in Beta, so hopefully when it goes to full release the author will put out a new version using the full release of Plazmic 4.7.  With all of the stuff that my Storm can do right now I rarely need to use my computer for communication.  I can do it all from my phone, and I love that.  The best part of it all is that the Blackberry can do all of that stuff at the same time.  I can be chatting in every IM client, while sending and recieving emails, while sending and receiving SMS or MMS messages.  I think you get the picture, I can see why these things are so popular.  They do everything, and they do it well.  I think I will be sticking with the Blackberry for a while, at least until I find something better.  And honestly I think that is going to be hard to do.