Friday, May 30th, 2008

new crackberry

So I got a Blackberry 8130 with Sprint, yesterday. At work, we're eliminating company-owned cell phones, and I'm tired of carrying two phones anyway. So I got the Pearl.

What an interesting endeavour that is turning out to be.
First of all, it's very unclear what services and functions related directly to the carrier (Sprint) versus services provided -by- Blackberry (RIM) itself.

My phone was incorrectly activated, at first. Then after googling around found that I had to do two steps to activate the data portion:

1) Options-Mobile Network-[Menu key]-Start Provisioning

2) Options-Advanced-Host Routing table-[Menu key]-Register now

After a fairly arduous time getting my Samsung A900 contacts into a data file, and then grepping out the non-ASCII crap, and then syncing my Treo to download contacts into Outlook (which I never use) and then merging the two CSV files... at least then I was able to use the RIM Desktop Manager on my work PC to get those into the phone.

http://blackberry8130.wordpress.com/2008/01/19/managing-contacts-in-the-address-book-using-excel/

At the moment, I have a standard Sprint data plan which allows the phone access to EVDO; on June 2 my plan switches to a Sprint Blackberry data plan which means I can then use RIM services - the Blackberry Browser and email isn't enabled unless you have a BB data plan. So in the meantime I am trying to download Opera Mini as a free non-BB browser, and SyncJE which will allow me to sync CMU's Oracle Calendar to my phone.

http://nexthaus.com/products_b_blackBerry.html

But I had trouble getting the BB desktop manager to import the application .alx files, and learned (thanks to Google's cache) that you need to separately install the Blackberry Device software - software that allows Desktop Manager to talk to your phone beyond simply syncing contacts etc.

http://na.blackberry.com/eng/support/downloads/download_sites.jsp

So, I'm now trying that.
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