You could say I’ve finally joined the current generation, but after more than a year of waiting on Telstra to release a 3G BlackBerry – and maintaining a vice-like grip on my old 7100x 2G device (no edge!) in the meantime – I’ve finally made the decision to upgrade to a BlackBerry Bold.

I have to confess, I was holding out a little longer, thinking that perhaps the Storm was the device to make all the Locatrix office iPhone huggers go “wow”.  Despite the fact that Telstra aren’t (yet?) releasing a Storm, an impending month of travel made me finally make the decision, and in doing so consolidate two SIM cards into one (my other handset of choice is/was a Nokia E51, which I still kind of like).

But the Bold arrived, neatly packaged and very shiny, so I couldn’t wait to try it out.  So I charged it, threw a SIM card in, spent a bunch of time on the phone to Telstra’s mobile data support folks (there was a problem in the transfer of my service from one MSISDN to another), pointed it at our hosted e-mail server, and….wow.   There’s so many features to play with that….. well lets just say I spent a warm Brisbane weekend cloistered in air-conditioned comfort playing with my new toy, and now have no idea how I lived without it.

The GPS works fine, and the Google Maps application for the Bold is a dream; I love the “Show Address in Google Maps” capability from the address book (amazingly helpful when doing sales calls in foreign cities).

Calendar & Syncing is OK; I wasn’t the biggest fan of the BlackBerry desktop application, and while it’s improved I felt it should have maybe moved on a bit more in the past year.  The e-mail application (admittedly with a QWERTY keyboard layout, which my 7100 lacked) works fine – I’ve found myself answering e-mails at my desk with the BlackBberry instead of the PC, although I will save my ranting about Outlook 2007 for another post.

The application support for social networking is good – MSN, Facebook and the TwitterBerry applications are my standards – and the WiFi support is brilliant.  Unlike the Nokia, where you get to set default networks/access points, the BlackBerry makes the very “bold” assumption that of course you want to use Wifi when you can.  Very cool.

I’m thrilled, and will probably write more in coming days.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 at 11:45 am and is filed under Mobile Devices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.