Wow! I love this Blackberry application! I had been waiting to get on Facebook and this is what put me over the edge. It will revolutionize the way the use your Blackberry Pearl (is that too strong of a statement?).

Here’s what it will let you do:

• Update your status. This is something on Facebook that says “Patch is blah blah blah.” It lets your friends know what’s going on with you. Kind of cool. You can now update this from your Blackberry Facebook application. So if you go from lunch to the beach, you can post it in the parking lot. Not sure if your friends need to keep that close of a watch on you, but they can. This same section will let you see what your “friends” are doing via their status.
• Upload and Tag Photos. This is the coolest part of this application. Take a picture with your Blackberry Pearl and a new option besides “save” or “MMS Message” is now available. You can choose to post that picture on your Facebook page. You can even tag your Facebook friends in your picture and it will link to them on Facebook. If you already have pictures on your Blackberry, you can tag and upload those as well.
• View your friends list. Scroll through your entire list of friends. Find someone you want to interact with and you can pop up a menu to choose been “writing on their wall”, “sending them a message”, “viewing their profile”, and “poking” them. I”m still not really sure what poking does, but you can do it.
• Invite a friend. Still have some friend who aren’t on Facebook? Send them an invitation to join your crazy new addiction. I think that’s pretty much all that one is for.
• Poke someone. Again, I don’t really know what this does other than telling people that you poked someone. If you know, please let us in on the secret.
• Write on their wall. You can write on your friends wall directly from your Blackberry. This is kind a public area where you can interact with your friends.
• Send them a message. Another way to interact with your friends without letting everyone else in on the conversation. It’s like email within Facebook.

All in all, this is a very cool application. If you’re using Facebook more often than once a week, you really need to get this application. The easiest way to do so is to point your Blackberry browser to www.facebook.com. It will notice you’re on a Blackberry and suggest the download. Don’t even think twice about it. Get it and start having fun.

I was going to show my wife how to transfer music from our PC to her new pink Blackberry Pearl, but she got a little impatient. I said “whatever you do, don’t mess with that ridiculous Roxio Media Manager. Instead I told her to check out the article I wrote about getting media onto a Blackberry Pearl.

Unfortunately, my wife didn’t follow direction or she got confused or something cause she ended up doing something a little different. This is a great discovery a lot of people may not know about (I didn’t).

Transfer Directly From iTunes to Your Blackberry Pearl

In the instruction I gave on getting around the Roxio Media Manager, I suggested opening up Windows Explorer and dragging files from the iTunes directory into the Blackberry Pearl “music” folder. Instead of doing this, my wife opened up TWO windows. One of them was Windows Explorer and the other was iTunes! She just started dragging files directly from her iTunes playlists straight onto her Blackberry Pearl.

I never realized you could do this. It’s so simple and it will even keep all of your Artist, Album and Genre information in tact. Of course, I tried to grab a playlist and move that over, but no luck. You’ll still have to create those on your Blackberry Pearl once you’ve uploaded your music, but it’s very simple. Maybe I’ll write a simple set of instructions for that in the future.

As for now, enjoy the drag and drop transfers from iTunes to your Blackberry Pearl. Oh, and now my wife gets to claim bragging rights for teaching her techno-geek husband how to do something on his Blackberry Pearl. Humbling to say the least, since she’s not really that technologically inclined.

* Added Bonus: Ok, now I’m starting to mess around with this and I really like what I’m seeing. I’m now able to use the awesome search and sort functions within iTunes to narrow down my songs to exactly what I want and then select them ALL and drag over to my Blackberry Pearl.

* Added Added Bonus: I think I’m going to create a “Blackberry Pearl” playlist in iTunes and then when I hear a song I want on my Blackberry, I can just drag it into that playlist. The next time I sync up my phone, I can just call up the “Blackberry Pearl” playlist and drag it’s content over to the Blackberry (remember, you have to drag the content of the playlist, not the playlist itself) and it will ask me if I want to replace the songs. Simply click “No to All” (I haven’t verified this is an option) and you’ll only move over the songs you didn’t have (kind of like a one-way sync).

I think I just found the GREATEST shortcut on the Blackberry Pearl. This is going to revolutionize the way you use your Blackberry Pearl and speed up almost everything you do.

Switching Between Applications

Until I discovered this shortcut, when I was in an application and wanted to switch over to look at something else, I would have to do one of two very inconvenient processes.

Imagine you’re looking at your messages and your boss asks if you have some time on Friday at 2pm for a quick meeting.  You need to check your calendar, so you:

1. Click repeatedly on the escape button (the one to the right of the pearl with the arrow) until you get back to your home screen.  Find and then scroll over to the calendar icon and click on that.
2. Click on the menu button, scroll all the way down to “Switch Applications” and scroll over to the calendar and click the pearl button.

That’s an improvement over the first option, but nothing compared to this quick application change shortcut.

Let’s take the same scenario: you’re in your messages and need to check your calendar.  Here’s what you do:

1. Press and hold the ALT button (it’s just below the ZX key)
2. Press the escape key once
3. Scroll over to the the calendar icon
4. Release the ALT button

That’s it!  I’m a huge user of the ALT-TAB shortcut on a Windows machine and this is just as easy.  Give it a shot and you’ll agree, even though it seems so basic and simple, it changes the way you use your Blackberry Pearl.

To keep your Blackberry Pearl running at the peak of it’s capabilities, you’re going to want to make sure you’re not wasting valuable memory on stuff you don’t need. You’d be surprised at what hogs up the memory. We’ll look at a few of the main items and how to delete or manage them.

First of all, how much memory do you have available? It’s very easy to find this out. Here’s how:

1. Click on the options icon (probably looks like a wrench).
2. Scroll to “status” and click
3. “File Total” is the total amount of memory available on your device.
4. “File Free” is the amount of memory free at this time.

Ok, so now that you know how much you have to work with, let’s see how big we can make that “File Free” number.

Clean out your inbox. I explain how to do this in another post, so I won’t go into the details here.

Content Compression

One of the quickest and easiest steps you can take to free up valuable memory on your Blackberry Pearl is to enable “Content Compression”. I don’t know exactly how much room you’ll gain from this, because I’ve always used it on my Pearl. If you’re isn’t already enabled, here’s how you do it:

1. Start on your main screen (the one with all the icons).
2. Scroll to and click on “options” (should look like a wrench).
3. Scroll to and click on “Security Options“
4. Scroll to and click on “General Settings“
5. Scroll down to “Content Compression“
6. If it doesn’t say “Enabled” click on it and select it now.
7. Press the Blackberry Button (7 dots left of the pearl)
8. Scroll down and select “Save“

That’s it. You’ve just enabled Content Compression. This will reduce the amount of memory used for all content, including picures, videos, music, calendar information and messages.

If yours wasn’t enabled before leave a comment to let me know how much memory you gained using this feature.

Delete Applications You Don’t Use

If you never play BrickBreaker, don’t let it hog up all the memory on your Blackberry Pearl. You might be surprised at how many programs are hanging out on your Pearl. Here’s how you find them and delete the ones you don’t want or need.

1. Go to your main home screen
2. Scroll to and click on “options” (looks like a wrench)
3. Scroll to and click on “Advanced Options“
4. Scroll to and click on “Applications“
5. Wait for your Pearl to build the list of applications
6. Scroll through and find any applications you don’t want, need or use
7. With that application selected, press the “Blackberry (menu) button“
8. Scroll down to “Delete” and press the pearl button

Note: Some applications will require you to restart your Blackberry Pearl before they’re completely removed.

There are a number of other tricks you can use to free up memory on your Pearl. I’ll explore some of those in a future post. Until then, take some time to impliment what we’ve gone over here. It will pay off in having a faster running Blackberry Pearl.

It’s tempting to simply ignore your inbox and let the messages pile up. It’s really important you don’t do this. If you’ve already read something, taken action on it by replying or putting it on your calendar, and have no need for a message on your Blackberry Pearl, DELETE IT.

As you let your messages pile up on your Blackberry Pearl, you’re taking up valuable memory space. To give you an example. Right now I have messages on my phone that date back to Sunday. I don’t know how many messages, but I’d guess it’s about 50 or 60. I currently have 3.2 MB of memory available. I’ve just deleted all of my message (more on how to do this quickly in a moment) and I now have 3.3 MB available. One quick action and I’ve freed up a bit of space. It’s not a ton, but it all adds up.

Here are a few options for managing and deleting your messages.

First step: Save what you need. Go through your list of messages and “save” the ones you think you might need. This is very simple.

Using your pearl button scroll down to the message you want to save, click on the ‘blackberry button’ (that’s the one with the 7 dots on it, just left of the pearl button). Scroll down to save and click on it.

Now it will be kept in a special “saved messages” folder. It won’t get deleted when you bulk delete your messages in your inbox (more on how to do that in a moment).

There are a number of options for deleting messages.

Delete only one TYPE of message. If you want to just delete your SMS messages in your out box, or if you want to only delete your MMS (pictures, video, sound) messages, you can do just that. Here’s what you do:

From your home screen, click on messages. Click on the “Blackberry Button” (remember that’s the one with the 7 little dots) and scroll down to “View Folder”. Select the appropriate folder and click your pearl button. At this point you can do one of several options. If you want to just delete one message at time, you can scroll to the message, press the Blackberry button and select “delete”. That can take a long time, so there are some other options.

Select and delete a group.

• Start at the top message of a group you want to delete.
• Press and HOLD the “shift” button.
• Use your pearl button to scroll down to the last message in the group.
• Release the shift button.
• Press the “Blackberry button”
• Select delete.
• That entire block of messages will be gone.

Delete all messages prior to a specific date

• Scroll to the bar at the top of each date (or the top of the entire list).
• Press the Blackberry button
• Select “delete prior”.
• All of the message from that date backwards will be deleted.

If you click the bar at the very top of the list of messages, select “delete prior”, you’ll delete ALL of your messages. Be careful with this option, you could end up deleting too many messages.

Note: If you want to delete your outgoing messages (SMS or MMS), you’ll need to go into that specific outbox under (View Folder) and delete those separately. You can use the same select and delete techniques as noted above.

That’s it. You’ve now cleaned up your messages and helped to free up extra memory on your Blackberry Pearl. There are several other ways to free up even more space on your Blackberry Pearl, but that’s a great start.

I have to admit, I have done my fair share of salivating over the iPhones in the Apple store. They’re not only fast, sleek and intuitive, they’re made by Apple and I love them. But… I have Verizon and I’m not willing to change to an inferior provider just to have an iPhone. Not to mention the fact my contract isn’t up yet.

So, instead of an iPhone I ended up getting a Blackberry Pearl. I’ve used Windows Mobile devices on several occasions and hated it. The last phone before the Blackberry Pearl was the VX6700. Nice slide out keyboard, but Windows Mobile is too bulky. In typical Windows fashion, it claims to do a ton of things, but ends up not being able to do any of them well.

I’ve fallen in love with my Blackberry Pearl. Now, when I see or hold an iPhone, I think “wow, this is a cool, but it doesn’t do what I need it to do.” Let’s compare the iPhone to my Blackberry Pearl:

• You can’t send MMS (pictures or video) messages with an iPhone. That seems really dumb for a phone these days. Especially when the phone has a camera. Why can’t I send an MMS? My Blackberry Pearl does a great job of sending photos, video and even audio. Check one for Blackberry Pearl.
• You can’t even receive MMS messages with an iPhone. If your friends have a regular phone and try to send you a picture message, it won’t come through. True, they can email it to you, but it still seems silly that the iPhone can’t receive a picture message. Check two for Blackberry Pearl.
• You can’t play 90% of the videos you find on the internet, unless they’re in .MOV format. Sure, the iPhone has a nice YouTube application, but what about stuff on other websites? I’ve only had one instance where my Blackberry Pearl couldn’t play a video. Check three for Blackberry Pearl.
• You can’t save a picture you find on the web to your iPhone. It just won’t do it. Want to make it a background? Not going to happen. The Blackberry Pearl is very intuitive about this stuff. It knows right were to save a file based on it’s type. Check four for Blackberry Pearl.
• You can’t take video recordings with your iPhone. Seriously, you can’t do it. Again, it seems strange to hear people talk about this being the phone of the future and then finding out it doesn’t do something even the most basic entry level phone can do. My Blackberry Pearl has a VERY nice video recorded and the playback is extremely sharp. People are amazed at the picture quality. Check five for the Blackberry Pearl.
• Ringtones can only be purchased through iTunes. If your friend has a ringtone they want to send you, it won’t work. Even with Verizon, I can still download ringtones from the internet with my Blackberry Pearl. It even knows it’s a ringtone and asks me if I want to set it up as my current ringtone. Check six for Blackberry Pearl.
• Uh, there’s no keyboard on an iPhone. I do love the look of the iPhone virtual keyboard, but too many people complain about it. I was a little nervous about the SmartType feature on the Blackberry Pearl, but it’s really smart. It’s almost like it can read my mind as I’m typing. The more you use it, the smarter it gets. Even though the keyboard on the Blackberry Pearl isn’t it’s strongest item, it’s better than the iPhone keyboard. Check seven for Blackberry Pearl.

Yes, I have a lot of things I LOVE about the iPhone, but overall I’m thrilled with my Blackberry Pearl.  Wait, did I mention the iPhone is only available through AT&T?  Yeah, that’s the major deal breaker for me.  Even if they corrected all the issues above, I’d have a hard time making the switch from Verizon to AT&T.

If I missed some items, please comment below and let me know.