Blackberry

[Dan East]

My main phone is now a Blackberry Pearl 8130. Anyone else have a Blackberry?

Dan

[sponge]

Played with a few, was tempted to get one, but ended up with a PPC phone after many years of being PPCless

[Chris Edwards]

I worked for RIM for 2 years on an internship. The BlackBerry has come a long way in the last few years. Have you tried developing for your Pearl yet?

What sort of data plan do you have?

So to answer-- I've had the 7200, pearl and 8700 as my primary work device. I still used my Windows mobile phone most of the time though (off of work), as it was nice not to be attending to work email all the time.

[Dan East]

Have you tried developing for your Pearl yet?

Yep, of course! I whipped up a Klondike Solitaire game since I couldn't find any free ones. I've worked on it for 15-20 hours or so, and its playable as of a couple days ago (won it twice yesterday). I just have a few things to refine and I'll release it as freeware with a link for people to paypal a little something if they like it.

I really like the Pearl - the thing is pretty slick. The funny thing is I would have never gotten one myself. Having done CE development since 1997, I would have only have ever bought a Windows Mobile based smartphone, since I already have the development toolset and experience. The main thing I don't like about the phone-size Windows Mobile smartphones is the lack of analog input. The Pearl solves that with the tiny trackball. My wife surprised me with it on Easter morning (my cellphone had died, and I kept taking hers, so she put an end to that!) I've encoded a few movies for it and threw them on my microSD card, and the playback is really good. The standard 1/8" miniature audio jack makes it a nice video player / mp3 player. I do a lot of eBoook reading (I've read the Lord of the Rings trilogy 3 times between my Asus a716 and Dell Axim x50v over the years, for one example), and found the free Mobipocket reader for the Blackberry. It makes for a nice ebook reader, and the screen DPI is much higher than a standard QVGA PPC, which gives the fonts a nice crisp look which is very readable (not as good as a VGA Axim, but close). So I've already done several hours of reading on it, and I simply haven't taken the Axim off the cradle since. I've mulled the idea of writing my own ebook reader for it, because my material is all in zipped html (converted from PDF usually), and Mobipocket only supports its own proprietary format. So I have to convert PDF->HTML->PRC which is a pain. So I'd like an html-native reader (I used the µBook reader for years on PPC, which reads html inside of zips). The form factor of the Pearl is simply too good. The thing is the perfect size, and the trackball allows full one-hand operation which is practically a requirement for a cellphone.

Our carrier is US Cellular, which is a small, regional player in the cell market. They have the strongest presence here and best coverage (CDMA has always had superior coverage in our rural area - GSM works along the interstates, but that's about it). Right now I just have a basic 4MB data plan for $15 a month while I feel this thing out and decide how I'm going to use it. They offer an unlimited data plan for $29, which I will probably end up going with eventually. At 1 cent a kB over the 4 MB (that's $10 a MB) it could be a very expensive deal if I go over.

Man, I didn't intend to say that much.

Dan

[sponge]

Dan, you should port my app to RIM :)

[RICoder]

Jeeze, I leave for a couple of years and its the same old faces...

On topic, I had a blackberry at work, then they bought me an iPhone, which is spiffy even if Mac sucks.

[sponge]

Have you unlocked it, aka made it useful?

Upgraded to a Sprint Mogul (HTC TyTN or some shit, I hate their model naming scheme) and I can't live without a hard keyboard. Too bad HTC loves making crappy devices that run slower than my A620 from 6 years ago.

[PointOfLight]

Dan, what tools did you use to develop for the Blackberry? I've been contemplating expanding my development knowledge to that platform, but I don't know much about the available tools.

[Dan East]

The Blackberry JDE. Everything about the Blackberry is java. You also have to install the official Java SDK first. It's all free. The biggest pain IMO is that the time to copy an executable to the emulator is quite long. The emulator has to restart each time. Copying to the device isn't much better, because roughly every other time it resets the device.

Dan

[mlepage]

Same faces indeed.

You can also develop in Eclipse with the available plug-in, and I believe NetBeans can be made to work in a similar fashion.

The device will reset if the program being installed was in use.