neurological dryer lint

well i got my blackberry. the company is paying for it - not a cent out of my pocket.



what i like: it's a nice little device, lightweight, supposedly good battery life. i needed 24x7 access to email but secretly i want to be able to google from anywhere. i'm sure in the coming days i'll find many more uses for it. the interface is somewhat intuitive - an escape button next to a scroll wheel is your primary navigation tool, and the way you type stuff is also clever and useful. there are a plethora of pinatas, er, applications available for it. web surfing isn't that fast but fast enough. the email tools are pretty handy too.

what i don't like: surprisingly from what i heard about this 'crackberry' device, there are a decent number of flaws. one - applications are EXPENSIVE. want to buy an ssh / telnet app? $100. remote server management tool? cheapest one i found is $200/server. aim client? $50. a full-featured web browser? $50. and most of those require that internally you run a blackberry enterprise server to make the applications work right. we tall did (say it quickly).

there are a handful of free/shareware apps out there, just not very useful ones. and the manual (lack thereof)... useless. i have no idea how to turn on IR-receive, for example. it's a good thing i didn't pay for this, or i'd be far more disappointed. but it does what its supposed to, which is email and web. i found a $3 tetris app, and now all i need is hold-em ($20 is the cheapest i've found, screw that) and an IM client that's cheap..