I’m not sure if I have gone over to the Dark Side or to the light, but as of last night I’m the owner of a Blackberry Curve 8310.
Setting the BlackBerry up is kind of a pain, especially since my old Cingular SIM card needed to be replaced by a new AT&T card. I had to call to activate the phone, then go through three different setup procedures to get my BIS account and associated email activated. It’s not a very user-friendly process and had me seriously wondering what I’d gotten myself into.
Once that was all done, though, things got easier. I love the over-the-air install, and already have three 3rd party applications running on my Curve: Twitterberry, the Gmail client, and a multi-IM client called WebMessenger. I still don’t really know how to use all the features of the Curve, but I’ll learn.
On a side note — switching SIM cards, while not a Blackberry-specific issue, brought to light exactly how unorganized and messy my personal address book management has become over the past few years. I run Thunderbird on my desktop and my laptop, and neither of those address books is complete or up-to-date, with some more key data living only on the SIM that I can no longer use.
No matter what I do for a PIM solution next, it’s going to involve a bunch of tedious manual data entry to bring all the bits and pieces of contact info I’ve accumulated together. I’ve got to figure out how to minimize that. I’ve even found myself wondering if this might be a good job for Plaxo (I’ve heard that they are not a grubby spamhaus anymore).
Thoughts?
Re contact info consolidation:
iPhone & OS X Address book (& iCal & GMail via IMAP in Apple Mail) make a very nice ecosystem that’s always synced. I had iPhone wiped few times (ahm, yes, I like to break things), and it syncs back with my Mac when restored. My laptop was out of commission for few weeks, so I’ve had iPhone sync with my iBook to have current address book on it. It even takes care of little details, like birthday added on iphone shows in iCal, or photo set on iPhone will show up in Address book and Mail on OS X. *and* if all of them blow up, there’s always hourly Time Machine backup. 🙂
And no, I’m not biased. I can prove that by having 9 Apple products in my household. With Apple TV coming in as well as soon as I save up for flat screen TV.