A couple of weeks back I had an unfortunate accident involving my Blackberry and some coffee which resulted in a dead handset.
As a relatively recent convert to the world of Blackberry – I got my first one only last Summer – I was surprised at how bereft I felt at becoming Blackberryless. The G1 I have on a different SIM just wasn’t a worthy alternative so I’ve grabbed myself a lovely new 8900.
I considered the Bold but the slightly larger feel of it didn’t suit my grip and I’d always found my previous Curve to be ideal.
The 8900 feels faster in operation than the 8310 but in most respects the two handsets are pretty much identical. The most immediate change is the refreshed look of the software. There are two modern looking themes included but, pretty annoyingly, no ‘today’ theme which means appointments and emails don’t appear on the home screen.
While this isn’t enough to detract from the handset’s strengths – better camera, faster applications and included support for MS Office documents through DataViz’s Documents to Go – it quickly became a major irritant. There are Today themes available on the web but the failure to include one is pretty odd.
Blackberry App World
I’ve also been playing around with the new Blackberry App World, attempting to download the App World App on my Mac resulted in a message directing me to download it via Internet Explorer which was obviously not an option but I was able to download the app direct to the Blackberry.
The App World seems sparsely populated for a platform which has so many third party applications already available and some of the ‘apps’ are little more than bookmarks to websites. That said, there are some good apps available and the inclusion of free downloads for some of the major social networking and IM brands will be welcomed by many and I’ve already wasted more time than I can spare on Par 72 Golf Lite.
The App World itself is pretty speedy to get around even over the GPRS connection used by the handset and the apps I’ve downloaded have all done so in an acceptable time.
I can’t see myself downloading many paid-for apps but these new stores have already proved themselves popular on the iPhone and Android platforms and with a vast back catalogue of apps for their devices it makes sense for Blackberry to launch one too.
