I did get that Blackberry the other day, and while I don’t have time to write an extensive review right now, I can say it’s all I hoped it would be and more. Somewhat surprisingly, it even reconciles properly with Gmail, surprisingly because Gmail’s POP implementation is a bit messed up in how it handles reconciliation on standard POP clients (and, as a result, there are still issues with reconciliation when I delete mail in Gmail or Thunderbird rather than the Blackberry, but I’m still experimenting and will post details in another post).
Even better, Google Talk for the Blackberry was released today, so I now have an open standard IM solution (i.e., my contacts don’t have to be inside a Google silo) that integrates across my desktops and mobile. Now, if Google would only use the Blackberry client to do over-the-air synchronization of my Google address book and Blackberry contacts (oh, and over-the-air Google calendar synchronization while you’re at it would be nice too :-)). Google Local for the Blackberry is an amazing piece of technology too.
P.S. – Google just acquired Writely. Yep, Google Office is coming together quite nicely.
Hey Ian-
I’m just wondering if you can sync to Yahoo calendars or contacts with the blackberry. I was kinda waiting also to see how things ended up; but its pretty easy for me to take my pitiful number of contacts and type them in manually to Yahoo. Same wth my calendar entries which mostly are repeating ones for every so often.
The link to the new Google Calendar looks pretty slick :)
I think you can do it in a roundabout way by using Outlook and Intellisync on a Windows box and then syncing to the Blackberry from there. That’s how I synchronize my contacts today. I keep my contacts in Thunderbird and use Plaxo to sync them to the cloud, so I just use Plaxo to suck my contacts into Outlook and sync to the Blackberry from there. As far as I know, the only way to do over-the-air synchronization today is with the Blackberry Enterprise Server, and that’s only to Exchange and the other hairballs. -ian
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