The Blackberry is a pretty useful device right out of the box, but its even more so with the addition of a few more applications. The good news is that most of these are free and easy to come by:

1) Blackberry Messenger: This is a standard part of the Blackberry OS now, but I don’t think the Blackberry Messenger gets the love it deserves. With it, you can keep your Blackberry enabled friends and associates in context contact without having to pay for text messaging through your cellphone provider. The Blackberry Messenger uses the Blackberry OS PIN to shoot messages back and forth, but what would make it even better if there was some way that I could send messages from a PC to Blackberry users the same way.

2) Google Talk: If you need to send and receive IM’s from a non-Blackberry user the Google Talk Client for the Blackberry OS is your best choice. The interface is similar to the Blackberry messenger, which is a good thing. My only gripe is that I seem to get disconnected from the Google Talk network much more frequently than I should. This might be a problem with my cellphone provider’s network and not Google, but I have to log back in a dozen or more times a day. Still, its the best of breed Blackberry IM option unless you want to pay for more robust applications.

3) Gmail Client: It may sound somewhat redundant to have a dedicated email client on your Blackberry, but the Gmail client gives you much of the functionality of the web based Gmail interfaced from your handheld device. You have access to your full Gmail contact list, access to all of your sent and archived mail and the ability to set up and apply labels. If you’re a Gmail power user its a must have.

4) Yahoo Messenger Client: Yahoo also has a dedicated (and free) Blackberry client. It’s essentially the same as the Google Talk client and enough people use Yahoo messenger to make it worth having.

5) Ramble IM: This is the best AOL Instant Messenger option for most users. A Blackberry native AIM client *does* exist and if you’re a T-Mobile user you may already have it installed. If you’re *not* a T-Mobile user for some reason AOL doesn’t seem to have any interest in you. I tried to snoop around a little bit and track down the Blackberry AIM client but its hilarious the lengths that AOL goes to in order to *prevent* you from using their services. A trip to the Blackberry website yields a message that “USB downloads are not allowed for this software”. Try to use the OTA dowload link and you get a message saying that “your cellphone provider” doesn’t allow use of the AIM service. That’s not exactly true, of course, since what it *really* means is that your cellphone provider hasn’t bought off AOL so that *they’ll* let you use the service. In typical AOL “wisdom” they place the onus for this on the cellphone provider. You can try to understand AOL’s logic in this since by LG 8700 shipped with a dedicated AIM client which I can use on the Alltel network, but I can’t easily access AIM on the *same cellphone network* with my Blackberry.

Unfortunately, a lot of people use the AIM service so its a pretty handy option to have on your telecommunications utility belt. The good news is that where AOL taketh away, the open source community delivers–Ramble IM is a functional AIM client that works like a charm on the Blackberry.

Ramble Instant Messaging (link is also WAP friendly)

There’s also a mobile version of the EBuddy website that allows you to access AIM, MSN and Yahoo from your Blackberry browser. I haven’t tried it yet but I will. Since MSN also doesn’t have a Blackberry native client this probably the best free workaround for that network.

http://www.ebuddy.com/mobile/

6) Twitterberry: Twitterberry is a nice little Twitter client for the Blackberry OS. You can easily update your Twitter feed and view your friends/public timeline right from your Blackberry desktop without any text messaging charges. If your cellphone provider is like mine you have unlimited Internet data access but get charged for text messaging, which makes this a handy thing to have. There’s also several java based Twitter clients that will work on your Blackberry including TinyTwitter (which I’ve tried and liked) and a few more that I haven’t tried. Look for a rundown of all of these java based Twitter apps, as well as how they hold up against Twitterberry, in a future post. There’s plenty of action in Twitter app development so there very well may be more Blackberry clients forthcoming.

Twitterberry Blackberry OS client for Twitter (WAP friendly)

7) Jaikuberry: These Blackberry apps have such clever names….as you’ve probably figured out by now Jaikuberry is a Jaiku client for Blackberry. It’s not as far along in the development cycle as the aforementioned Twitterberry but it works well despite its somewhat spartan appearance. You can also post to Jaiku on their mobile web interface at http://m.jaiku.com

Jaikuberry website
Jaikuberry OTA download

8.) Google Maps: It might not be as powerful as the Google Maps web based version, but its still a good thing to have on your device.

Google Maps for Blackberry (WAP)

9) Yahoo Go!: Yahoo Go! only works on newer Blackberry devices, but its a pretty impressive application. If you use Yahoo’s email service you can check your mail with it, but even if you don’t there’s a lot to like about it. It has a slick interface that provides easy access to news, weather, sports, finance and entertainment updates along with driving directions and mapping. The thing that really rocks about Yahoo Go! is the mobile interface it provides to the Flickr photo sharing service. The Flickr widget is downright amazing and it makes mobile use of the service almost as easy and fully featured as the online version. I had an application on my LG 8700 for awhile that I actually paid for that purported to offer the same mobile interface to Flickr, and the free Yahoo version is far superior. My only real complaint with Yahoo Go! is that it takes a bit of time to load, but its by and large worth the wait.

Yahoo Go!

10) Ka-Glom! The Blackberry isn’t really a gaming platform, but it never hurts to have a time killer on board for waiting in line at the airport or DMV. Brickbreaker quickly grows tiresome for me, so I recommend you replace it with the addictive in a Tetris-like way game called “Ka-Glom!”. I found it at the default Blackberry homepage on my device web browser under the link entitled “super games”.

Honorable Mention: Opera Mini: I get by pretty well with the default Blackberry browser but when you need something with more features and the ability to render web pages more or less as they’d be displayed in an offline browser Opera Mini is the tool you need.

Opera Mini (WAP friendly)

Technorati Tags: Blackberry, RIM, Blackberry applications, Blackberry tools, Twitter, Jaiku, productivity

For the past month or two I’ve been using a new voicemail service called Callwave. Callwave offers a lot of the same functionality as the other web based voicemail services like a web interface, an option to receive your voicemail as audio files. They also offer some cool new features that I’ve only partially started to take advantage of. There’s a feature called “Callback” that lets you return calls with the push of a button in the web interface. As the Callwave folks put it “your phone will ring, and their phone will ring”. You can also respond to callers with a text(SMS) message via the web interface. There’s a nice contact manager and a log of all missed calls whether or not a voicemail is left.

Where Callwave is really trying to raise the bar, however, is with their voice to text interface. When a caller leaves a message the Callwave system transcribes it to text which it then delivers to you via one of several methods of your choosing including email and SMS. Since I have a Blackberry as my primary phone, I get my notifications via email. The way I’ve got it configured it has the advantage of showing up on my Blackberry almost immediately and gets logged in my Gmail in-box which makes follow up and general processing easier. Missed calls are likewise sent via email (or SMS if you so desire). The first time someone calls Callwave gets the name and city information from the caller ID info, but once you set it up in your contact list you’ll get notified with whatever name you’ve entered.

It’s a great idea, but for now the text recognition and transcription is clearly a “work in progress”. If you’ve ever messed around with a voice to text program (I used to use Dragon Naturally Speaking, for example) you already know that even the state of the art is far from perfect. Trying to transcribe voicemail messages–which present issues like countless speaking styles and accents, connection issues and so forth–has a much higher degree of difficulty. In all fairness to Callwave before I begin my critique of the voice-to-text performance, they’re definitely aware of the current limitations of the product. They’ve named the voice-to-text functionally “VText Gist”, and indicate that the goal is to give you the “gist” of a voicemail message via text output. They’ve got the product labeled as a “beta” and while its still in beta mode its free.

I get phone calls from people all over the country and, for that matter, all over the world. We’re talking some callers who have thick Italian, Latino or southern accents and others who speak as impeccably as Michael Buffer or the “Classy” Jimmy Lennon, Jr. And, being voicemail some people actually speak clearly but many don’t despite the Callwave system’s instruction to “speak clearly” to facilitate transcription. To Callwave’s credit, there’s not much qualitative difference among callers and non-native English speakers get transcribed the same as those with perfection diction.

The problem is that the quality of the transcription is still not that great. Even with Callwave only trying to provide the “gist” of the voicemail message much of the time you’re left with often unintentionally funny gibberish. There’s been a few times where I actually *did* “get this gist” of the voicemail from the Callwave transcription, but in these instances I already basically knew what the call was about. Other times even when I *did* know the basic topic of the message I was still clueless. Here’s a few examples. The first is a call from my local library reprimanding me about some overdue books. Since this was a call *from* an automated dialer *to* an automated system the degree of difficulty is pretty low:

RICHLAND COUNTY work called from 803-933-9665 in Columbia, SC. Vtxt Gist of this message:

“…address has items on hold for items overdue if you have any questions please call any of our tends library locations.”

That was pretty good. “Richland County” obviously covers a lot of ground but I’ve since entered “Richland County Public Library” in my contacts. And the “gist” of the message came through loud and clear–I’ve got overdue books out and I better get them back in. The only word that was transcribed incorrectly was “ten” which came across “tends”, but this didn’t impact the clarity of the message.

This does, however, indicate another problem with the system for now–the Callwave service pulls out a snippet of the message trying to convey its “gist”. With a short, to the point call like the one above that’s not a big deal. The problem is that long, rambling and less focused voicemail messages are more the exception than the rule. As a result, there’s no guarantee that the part of the message transcribed by Callwave is really what’s important. Now, granted, people should generally leave more succinct voicemail messages for a number of reasons but the reality is that they don’t.

The next message was from a friend returning a call and suggesting dinner plans. The only way I knew this was the reference to “blue cactus”, which is the name of a local restaurant:

“…I’m just calling you back sorry it took me a little while I’ve been in the meeting all day but just call me back. I was thinking that if you lag we could go to like an early turner thing at blue cactus because I’m creating blue cactus so just coming back up talk to you later”

Now, the only way I was able to get the “gist” of this message was the reference to the ‘blue cactus’. If I had been new in town or otherwise didn’t know it was a local restaurant I would have been absolutely clueless.

Clearly, there is still much to be done to improve the voice-to-text functionality but this could very well be the “killer app” for Callwave. Once I can count on a clearer translation of the messages I’d gladly pay for this service. This function aside, the other web based voicemail features are excellent. The service is easy to set up and highly configurable. While its still in beta and free I highly recommend you give it a shot–once the text-to-voicemail transcription catches up with the rest of the service it’ll be something that you’ll gladly pay for and wonder how you ever did without.

CallWave Modern Voicemail: Text is the New Voicemail

Technorati Tags: productivity, tech, handy tools, voicemail, Callwave, cell phones, SMS, email

TwitKu web based Twitter and Jaiku client

The Prophet @ Jaiku

The Prophet @ Twitter

Technorati Tags: lifestreaming, microblogging, Twitter, Jaiku, web tools, TwitKu