smart computer use?

I’ve been thinking about how the usage by my phone relates so much with my usage of a computer. I’ve been finding that my Blackberry is just as important to my daily computer usage as my computer itself.

Here’s the simple reason why:

My Blackberry has been put in the position that is it is notifying me of “things” that I will need to do. In turn, those “things” are then requiring my use of a PC to attend to them.

So, I don’t need to spend a ton of time near a PC when waiting to see what needs to be done next. I’ll be notified through my Blackberry, either by email, text, phone call, calendar item and so on. Then I take action and hop on a computer and take care of business.

I like this system because I don’t have to sit in front of a PC as much to take care of daily business. I kinda like that.

I didn’t even really think of how slick of a system that has become, now that I think of it I’m going to have to start pushing more things through that notification and action system.

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ROTFWKBMU…

Rolling on the floor with kids beating me up.

I liked it.

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I like Pandora Internet radio quite a bit. In fact, I’m switching over to it right now since I just realized I wasn’t listening to anything at all at the moment.

Being that I use a Blackberry, I was quite amused to find that Pandora will be available on Blackberry phones shortly. From Information Week:

Pandora is a streaming-music service that uses an analysis system called the Music Genome Project to create personalized radio stations for a user based on any song or artist the consumer wants. The service will be free, but Pandora will serve visual and audio ads. The music application will run over a BlackBerry’s Wi-Fi, 3G, or EDGE connection.

Yes! It appears I should be able to use my Curve, so I should be ready to roll when it’s available.

What devices can use Pandora?

The music application is available on handsets that have the 4.3 version of the BlackBerry operating system or better, and this includes the Bold, Curve, and Pearl lines.

That should pretty much cover everybody, just make sure you are using a Wi-Fi, 3G or EDGE connection.

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I guess you could say that TwitterBerry is probably the simplest app I have on my Blackberry. It’s super simple. I open it, it asks me what I’m doing, I type and send, then I close. It’s simple. In that way, it mimicks it’s web counterpart. The Twitter web site is probably the simplest web site that most Twitter users use on a daily basis. That’s a good thing.

What I really like about TwitterBerry is that I don’t need to use SMS to tweet from my Blackberry. Instead, TwitterBerry works over the data network. That way, all the Twitter stuff on your phone is kept in it’s own app and doesn’t overrun your SMS activites. That was one of the first things I noticed when I started using SMS to tweet. I was using the SMS a lot and my text message communications were being invaded by Twitter related stuff. It was fine I guess but kinda annoying. No longer.

If you use Twitter and you have a Blackberry, I consider TwitterBerry indispensible.

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I guess you could say that I’m rather new to the Blackberry smartphone craze. Up until I got a Blackberry Curve, I really didn’t use a phone for much more than anything but making phone calls. I have a few months of Blackberry use under my belt now, and I have 4 blackberry apps that I find to be very useful, meaning that I use them frequently to good effect.

Gmail for Mobile

This is the single most usefull Blackberry app for me. I pipe all my email accounts into Gmail and use Gmail as my main email interface. This is because I use 3 different computers on a day to day basis and need to keep my email organized and accessible on a common platfrom from all three computers.

Gmail just makes handling my email so easy.

So… the first thing I did when I got a Blackberry Curve was to download the Gmail for Mobile app that allows me to use Gmail right on my phone. Brilliant!

It helps me to keep on top of my communications while on the go. Good stuff. Plus I like it a lot better than the built in email on the Blackberry Curve.

Google Maps for Mobile

Another Google product? Yes!

Google Maps on a Blackberry smartphone is just flat out useful. I rarely use map services on my computers because I’m kind of an on-the-fly traveler. When I’m out on the go, that is when I need to access map services, and being able to use Google Maps right on my Blackberry is very handy for finding places quickly.

Flickr for Mobile

This little app from Flickr allows me to upload photos right from my phone to my Flickr account. I can add descriptions and tags easily too. This is a useful app mainly because I like to take a lot of random photos with the camera on my Blackberry and then I can just upload them straight to Flickr and move on.

Flickr is nice too because I can set up photo streams on my blogs. What I am easily able to do is this:

1. Take a photo on the Blackberry
2. Upload it to Flickr and tag it properly
3. Watch the photo automatically get put into the photo stream on my blog

Great!

Yahoo Instant Messenger for Mobile

Being a web developer, I have a lot of contacts that are not local who use Yahoo Instand Messenger as a primary way to communicate with me.

Having this little chat app running on my phone allows me to communicate with my Yahoo contacts easily, without needing to be in front of my computer.

It’s very nice to be able to give direction to a programmer on a web project through my phone. It makes me more accessible to the developers and programmers that I work with and allows me to in turn let them work efficiently because they don’t need to sit around and wait for me to get back in front of a computer to chat with them for on-the-fly types of situations.

Bridging the gap

One thing that I noticed about my list is that all my most useful apps are allowing me to mimic actions that I would typically need a computer to do. This just goes to show how smartphones in general are starting to bridge the gap between what computers and phones can be used for.

Interesting.

There’s plenty more

There are a lot more useful Blackberry apps out there, I’m just scratching the surface here with my little 4 point list.

I hope that you might find this information useful, feel free to share any apps that you find useful on a regular basis.

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