Blackberry fun
One of the bad things about what I do for a living is that I have to carry a cell phone. One of the good things about that bad thing is that, for various & sundry reasons, it gets to be a Blackberry “smartphone” device. That’s good because, if I’m going to have to carry the electronic tether around with me, at least it gets to be one that is a cool toy & has lots of nifty, geeky stuff that I can do with it.
As a side note, it seems that the friendly IRS has decided that companies providing cell phones to their employees is an untaxed benefit, as those employees have been using those phones for some non-work-related purposes. Imagine that! And we can’t have a non-taxed benefit out there, now can we?
This is causing many employers, mine included, to examine their current policies, and craft new ones that close this loophole. The most common way of doing so will be to provide a stipend (taxable, natch…) which the employee can then use to purchase the necessary/required cell phone service/package. My current employer hasn’t done this yet, but the writing is on the wall, and it’s going to happen sometime in the next few months. So, I was able to get a new device request pushed through, so that one last new Blackberry got bought for me without having to go through the hassle of a stipend purchase and/or reimbursement.
So, I was able to snag the nifty-keen Blackberry Curve 8330 from Verizon. And it’s pretty darned cool. I’ve even gone over to the dark (dork?) side and gotten a Bluetooth headset (a Jabra 8040, which I highly recommend, as it’s been very good) to pair with it. As I’ve gotten over a bit of self-consciousness re: using the headset, I’ve found it to be immensely useful & convenient, particularly when I take/make a phone call in the car.
If you already have a Blackberry and you want to learn more about it and/or want to trick it out a bit, a great place to start on that quest is CrackBerry.com - a great clearinghouse of reviews, information, downloads, shopping, and generally all things Blackberry related.
Newer Blackberries also afford you the luxury of customizing the visual interface via theming. After a while, the stock themes get a bit boring, and the free offerings out there are a bit thin & uneven. There are, however, some good, high quality, and reasonably priced themes available. And some of the theme designers will even customize their offerings for you, if you ask nicely enough! ;^) Once such top-notch designer is Corey Visto, creator of the amazingly good Visto Premium BlackBerry Themes. Corey’s Chrono & BB OSX themes are particularly amazing, and he even did a custom job for me that combined elements of those two themes into a theme that was just what I was looking for in a theme. Corey’s a top-notch designer, a pleasure to do business with, and gets my highest recommendation!
In a perfect world, I would’ve liked to have held out for an iPhone, but that just wasn’t in the cards — boo! The 8330 Curve is a pretty darned good consolation prize, especially given how well it integrates with the Google Apps that I use for my domain (gmail, gdocs, gcal), its integration with Remember The Milk for keeping on task & organized, and a bunch of other stuff like web browsing & the like.
-ghp
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