For the past year and a half I’ve had a personal cell phone, AT&T Razor, and a business PDA: Verizon Motorola Q.  Both have their benefits & let downs. Overall, I like the usability of the “full keyboard” on the PDA… but I also like the simplicity of the Razor flip phone.  About 2 weeks ago some of us at the company got an upgraded phone model… all Blackberrys. I’ve never had a Blackberry, but it’s great if you’re using it to sync with your personal emails (Gmail, personal website emails, etc..)  NOT fully syncing with a small business exchange server. REPEAT- you must have a BES (Blackberry Enterprise Server)- costs thousands of $$dollars!  I was VERY VERY frustrated with this phone’s syncing (or lack there of) capabilities with my work email server for the first week or so, until I decided to just deal with it.  I read more blackberry user forums than I’d like to think about.  The user guide that came with the phone was extremely simple, and did not help me much at all.

The BB Storm syncs well with my personal email lauren@laurenallenphotography.com and my gmail address-  it took all of 1 min 30 seconds to set each of those emails up on my phone. NO JOKE.  It took be about 7 hours to figure out how to correctly sync my Lead Maverick company email account on my phone. Ugh.  I have to leave my Blackberry desktop email redirector software running at all times, if I want my work emails to wireless sync (simply forward to my handheld.)  How annoying.  My old Motorola Q was windows based and had much better (COMMON SENSE) syncing options. I could turn my computer off, etc… and never had to manually plug my phone into my desktop in order to receive/sync properly with my email accounts and calendar. I could also access my Outlook folders and choose which folders I wanted to sync on my handheld, FROM my handheld. I never had to set anything up from my desktop.   With the BB Storm, I constantly have to manually plug into my computer to sync/setup.  The Storm’s Outlook email on  my phone does not sync/reconcile emails on my handheld vs. my Outlook/computer.  So basically, if I delete an email on my phone, it doesn’t sync it with my Outlook (because we aren’t running our Microsoft Exchange mail server on a BES.) How ridiculous. C’mon, Blackberry- get with the program!  I also can’t open .mp3 or .wav files as email attachments. This becomes a problem, because our corporate voicemail sends email with the voicemail/audio file attached.  Grr.. I hope that BB will release some type of software update for this problem. But the phone can play .mp3 files if they’re not email attachments. Just silly.

One piece of software you WILL want to download (I usually don’t ever download any “extras,” but this is a MUST!  Blackberry STORMLOCK (this will prevent your face from randomly pressing buttons on the touch-screen while in a call.) Try a FREE TRIAL, and then download it for less than $3.. believe me, it’s very worth it! http://www.steelthorn.com/products/stormlock/

Anyway, I love the BB Storm for everyhting else it offers, just be VERY aware that if you’re trying to use a BB storm to sync with your exchange server email, it must have a BES installed in order for you have full syncing capabilities/options!!