BlackBerry 8330
Posted on October 4, 2008 by Ben Cecka
I was lucky enough to hit the A-list at work for an upgrade to a BlackBerry 8830 from my usual cell phone. This is the first mobile device that I’ve ever owned and I’m totally hooked. It’s like the move from dial-up to broadband — I’m not sure I could ever go back to a standard cell phone or not owning some type of 3G device.
That being said, I’m disappointed with the lack of solid, free applications written for the platform. I spent hours trying to find a reasonable program to view my school books (PDF format) from my media card and mostly found paid subscription software that was grossly overpriced. I ended up creating a BlackBerry email account and sending my PDF’s to it. It’s a workaround that I’m willing to live with rather than fork out money for something we all take for granted in the PC world. I don’t understand why BlackBerry developers think they should be charging for something as basic as a reader that is free on virtually every platform I’ve ever used. Charge for the added value of the writer (like Adobe Acrobat), but give the reader away and get your name on the device.
The next thing that got me was the difficulty in listening to streaming music on it. I know I can throw MP3 (maybe OGG) files onto it and play them locally, but I really just want a Pandora or Last.fm setup where I can play a tag or similar artist station. Pandora doesn’t support the BlackBerry and their web-based player thought my IP was from Norway so wouldn’t work either. Last.fm doesn’t support the BlackBerry directly as well and even if I wanted to scrobble tracks played locally I needed to buy software (3rd party). End of the road here is that I applied for a Last.fm API key so that I could attempt to write my own streamer for the BlackBerry. More to come on that I hope — still waiting on the key.
And yes, if and when I complete this project (I already have a name picked out) I will absolutely release it for free.
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