Happy New Year, though it may not be for Blackberry fans. The company that has so often had their products compared to a certain addictive substance recently announced that they are ending support for Blackberry OS and Blackberry 10 devices.
What does this mean? On January 4th, Blackberry will be shutting off all the key services — data, SMS, phone calls, and support. But back then, the people who used them were texting wizards who had broken free from the chains of the T9 keyboard. We never had one ourselves during the heyday, though we did pick up a cheap used model to carry around as a tiny mobile writing device and calendar.
We sure do miss phones with real keyboards though, and would love to see them come back. At least the keyboards themselves get love in the hacker community. Last month we featured an interesting project from Hackaday. This would let you drop in modules for everything from LTE to packet radio, opening up a nearly limitless possibilities for handheld hacking. He even put together a video about the current status of the device, which you can see after the break.
The short version is: it works, and it looks fantastic. For those who might not have seen this project the first time around , the front features a 2. What are the factors that should contribute to this decision?
That is, when you wanted to check your email on your mobile phone, you access a mail application and then poll your server to see if any new mail has arrived. This process is usually slow due to network latency and hardware of small devices.
Research In Motion RIM , the company that makes the BlackBerry, stepped in and developed a push technology that delivers new emails to your mobile device. This allows you to set up alerts and even be proactively notified when you receive certain email messages [Hack 30]. This is analogous to accessing the Internet with broadband versus dial-up. Your BlackBerry is like broad-band—it is on all the time. Introduced with BES 4. This device will theoretically be able to determine the optimal connection depending on your proximity to an Unless you have good reasons not to, you should go with an unlimited data plan.
Second, because data is pushed to your device, you have little control over the amount of data that gets sent. You get plenty of email as it is. Actually, with most carriers, the data plan and the voice plan are optional.
There are some users who use the device without a calling plan and use only the data features of the device. There are others fewer, for sure who use the BlackBerry as a phone without a data plan. Be careful, though—when you choose to have no voice plan, you can still use the phone to make calls.
Those calls you make cost an arm and a leg, too. Did you know the BlackBerry has a clipboard? Use it to save tons of keystrokes. Any time you can get away without typing text on your device or using shortcuts [Hack 7] , you should. This will allow you to be more efficient and crank out more messages from your device with less effort. Although this is a trivial task on an actual computer, it is a little more difficult on your BlackBerry.
Committing these steps to memory now will definitely go a long way in your becoming the ultimate BlackBerry road warrior. Once you have identified the text you would like to copy, you need to select it, just like on your computer. Remember that holding down the Alt key while scrolling with the trackwheel moves your cursor horizontally. This puts the BlackBerry in selection mode. Notice the cursor covers only the bottom half of a character when in this mode as shown in Figure Notice that entire lines are selected when you scroll.
Hold down the Alt key while you scroll with the trackwheel to move horizontally on the current line one character at a time. Choose Copy to send the selected text to the clipboard see Figure Notice after you copy text you are no longer in selection mode. When you have placed the cursor in the proper position, click the trackwheel once to bring up the menu.
The text appears as shown in Figure Also, the clipboard lives in the operating system so it is available across applications. This lets you copy text from a web site via the BlackBerry Browser into a new message in the Mail application.
Cut the course with shortcuts—perhaps the most powerful and underused feature of the device. The BlackBerry has a very rich system of using shortcuts and hotkeys to quickly navigate inside of applications, and to launch applications from the Home screen.
The Alt key is on the left side of your keyboard. It is just below the A and to the left of the Z. The Shift key is the same as the zero on your keyboard, or it may also be on the right of the keyboard, left of the Power Button and right of the spacebar. Release Alt when you are done typing. These shortcuts have been tested on a Because of keyboard layout differences, some of these shortcuts will not work on a series device, such as the g.
Hold the Alt key while you use the trackwheel to scroll horizontally through any field where you can enter or view text. You can always move character by character by using Alt and scrolling the wheel. When viewing a message, list, or web page, you can scroll by page instead of by line by holding down the Alt key and scrolling. Hold the Shift key while you are scrolling through several items to select them all.
This is useful for processing multiple messages at once. Table lists some more navigation shortcuts. Alt-Escape the button on the side beneath the scroll wheel. Changes the currently active application [Hack 6]. Alt-Return or Shift-Space. Goes to the bottom of the message, list, or web page. Moves to the next item next day in Calendar, next message in Messages. Moves to the previous item previous day in Calendar, previous message in Messages.
You may press Alt-Shift to activate Caps Lock. Of course, there is no need to use it in emails, since the BlackBerry capitalizes text for you automatically. When Caps Lock is on, an icon will appear in the top-right corner of your display that is a little oval with an arrow in it.
You may press Shift-Alt to activate number lock. This will let you punch the numbers on the BlackBerry keyboard with reckless abandon. Table lists the shortcuts that are available from the Home screen.
Launch the Address Book or, on Vodafone devices, open the Applications folder. To rearrange the Home screen [Hack 5] , highlight an icon, press Alt, and then click the trackwheel. You can move the icon somewhere else, hide it, or show all the hidden icons.
Sadly, there is no way to change or remap hotkeys to different applications. Turn on the backlight by tapping the Power button. The shortcut to select items is useful in selecting several messages at a pass. Your loving mother, who forwards you a few select jokes or chain letters every now and then, usually sends them in bulk. By using Alt-scroll you can roll your way down the list of emails from Mom and tap Del to delete them [Hack 22]. Sorry, Mom. You know I love you. While reading an email you can press spacebar or Return to scroll down a page at a time, or Alt-Return or Shift-spacebar to scroll up one page at a time.
Table shows some more shortcuts you can use while reading an email. Go to next delivery error. File selected message. Scroll up until selected message is on the bottom of the screen. Go to oldest message in the thread of the currently selected message. Go to newest message in the thread of the currently selected message.
Press and hold a key to capitalize it. Press the spacebar twice to insert a period automatically and capitalize the next letter you type. This is one of the most underrated features of the BlackBerry. Press the spacebar to insert and. You can use hotkeys to change the view. Table lists the calendar shortcuts.
The BlackBerry Browser has some surprisingly useful shortcut keys. Table lists them. Save current page to message list. Show current page address and title. Bookmark the current page. Switch back to the program that previously had the focus.
Bring up connection statistics about the current session. You can change the signal strength meter from useless bars to the actual numeric of your signal strength. For more information, see [Hack 17]. These are things you may need to have available if you call in for support due to a misbehaving BlackBerry.
Emory Lundberg, and Dave Mabe. Have your calendar items sync to your server-based mailbox continuously over the air. If you are a BlackBerry Enterprise Server user, you know how quickly your emails arrive to your device—almost immediately. With the introduction of Version 2. Unless your device has been provisioned over the air to a 4.
You can change that so your calendar items synchronize continuously over the air. This turns out to be quite a convenience for heavy calendar users and for users who have multiple people managing their schedule using a server-based calendar. Under Handheld Applications, select Calendar, and then click on the Choose button on the top-right side of the dialog box.
After clicking OK, a dialog box will appear saying that you need to synchronize to enable wireless calendaring. Because there are often many calendar items in your calendar that would take a lot of airtime and server resources to sync over the air, Desktop Manager has you do a cradled sync one last time before enabling the wireless calendar feature.
For syncing a large number of items, this type of sync is far more efficient. Click the Synchronize Now button to sync your device. Clicking OK starts the synchronization process as shown in Figure Once the Intellisync is complete, your calendar items will sync over the air whether the changes are initiated from your device or from your server-based mailbox.
Remove your rarely used icons from your main screen. This decision immediately made a tremendous amount of J2ME software available for the BlackBerry and established the BlackBerry as a leading platform for application development.
There are two chapters of this book dedicated to various third-party applications. Each of these applications installs an icon on your Home screen consuming valuable screen real estate. These icons range from visually appealing to absurdly unrecognizable.
All these icons can make your Home screen difficult to navigate. Just when you get used to your icons being in a certain place, you install another application and all the icons shift around the screen so the Calculator icon shows up in the first instead of the last column.
Here are the steps to move that Search icon to the first row right beside the Messages application. While pressing the Alt key, click the trackwheel one time. Select Move Application.
Use the trackwheel to position the icon beside the Messages application and press Enter. Figure shows the Search icon in its new location. There are some icons I hardly ever use. They just take up space on my Home screen and get in the way. The minimalist in me likes to run a tight ship and show icons only for the applications I use most often.
To hide any icon on your Home screen, select the icon and repeat steps 1 and 2 from the previous section. Select Hide Application instead of Move Application. Figures and show how to hide the Memopad application. The Memopad icon disappears, and the trailing icons shift over to take its place. This hack goes a long way to tidying up your Home screen.
BlackBerry makes it easy to unhide all your icons at once. Use the steps outlined earlier to access the menu you used to hide your icons. Select this option and all your icons will now appear on the Home screen allowing you to access that hidden application. As BlackBerry users, we marvel at the efficiency that the BlackBerry provides. This efficiency causes even the slightest delay to seem like an eternity. It turns out that the BlackBerry OS provides an easy way to multitask by sending applications to the background.
This method is analogous to the Alt-Tab functionality that Microsoft Windows provides. Rather than stare at a blank screen with a slowly moving progress bar across the bottom, you can respond to some emails and have the web site load in the background. To switch to the Messages application, hold the Alt key, and then press and release the Escape key.
As you continue to keep the Alt key down, a list of icons appears, as shown in Figures and Each icon represents an application that can currently be switched to. This sends the BlackBerry Browser to the background, and the Messages application is started and brought to the foreground. This process is called preemptive multitasking , which means the operating system uses an algorithm to intelligently decide which application gets access to system resources such as processor and memory.
Typically, foreground applications receive a higher priority for getting access to resources than a background application. Because this functionality exists in the BlackBerry Operating System, all applications are able to use it—even applications made by third parties. This serves a couple of different purposes. This hack is probably most useful for minimizing the browser while accessing a slow site, but there are other convenient uses as well.
The background programs are left in the same state they were in when you initially sent them to the background. This makes it especially useful for cutting and pasting text [Hack 2] between applications. Use abbreviations for commonly typed words to save time and your thumbs. You already realize by now that one of the main features that sets a BlackBerry apart from other handhelds is its keyboard. You can walk in any airport in the world and see that distinctive thumb-typing all around you.
But even as simple as the BlackBerry makes entering keystrokes, typing a long email is still cumbersome. A nifty feature called AutoText can alleviate some of that burden by replacing abbreviations with full text. This ends up saving valuable keystrokes by letting you type less. RIM conveniently provides a slew of built-in AutoText entries that you may have already benefited from without even knowing it.
Suppose you often find yourself typing your mailing address into the mail messages you send via your BlackBerry. Here are the steps to create an AutoText entry to simplify that. Once you are in the AutoText program, click the trackwheel once to bring up the menu. Choose New see Figure The configuration screen appears.
The Language field is used to specify which language of the ones installed on your device this AutoText entry should work in. Click the trackwheel and choose Save. If you find yourself often misspelling the same word, create an AutoText entry and just keep on typing.
Not only can abbreviations be replaced with static text, but you can use AutoText to insert dynamic text as well. BlackBerry provides a set of 11 macros that can be used in the With field to insert the current date, owner information, or other variables.
Table shows a list of the built-in macros and what they do. To access these macros, go to the With field in a new AutoText entry and click the trackwheel. Scroll down and select Insert Macro see Figure A menu will appear with the list of macros and a brief description. This hack is one you can use constantly.
As you type, be on the lookout for text strings that would make good candidates for AutoText—your thumbs will thank you! Those difficult-to-find symbols can slow your typing down to hunt-and-peck speeds. Your device has a hidden Event Log that can be viewed using a certain key combination. Similar to the event log on a Windows computer, there is an Event Log on your BlackBerry device where applications and the BlackBerry operating system itself can log information. You can view the Event Log on your device and even filter certain events, copy them to the clipboard—even email the entire log to someone.
This should bring up the Event Log viewer as shown in Figure From within the Event Log, you can view the details of each event by pressing the Enter key. Figure shows the details of an event. You can copy specific events to the clipboard on your device by clicking the trackwheel when viewing the details of an event and selecting Copy Event. Once the summary is on your clipboard, you can paste it into any other program, including in a new message, by using the trackwheel menu and choosing Paste.
When you access the Event Log, the program reads the current events and displays them on the screen. As you are viewing the events, additional events may have been logged since you started the program. You can use a number of options to filter the events or even expand your view to include events that have a lower severity. To access the filter options, click on the trackwheel and choose Options from the menu.
By default, the Event Log displays events with a severity of Warning. Modifying the Minimum Log Level changes the threshold for any events that get logged after you make the change. So you cannot change the level from Warning to Information or Debug and expect to see additional events retroactively—only new events will be affected by your change. Also, consider the impact of setting the threshold to Debug Info: as with debugging logs on any platform, they can quickly fill and consume system resources.
By default, the events from all applications are displayed in the Event Log. Be sure and save your changes after you make modifications to the Options screen. The Event Log program also gives you the ability to clear the log. Choose Clear Log from the trackwheel menu to purge all entries in the Event Log as shown in Figure to start from scratch when troubleshooting a problem. Imagine you are in a remote location, far, far away from the nearest WiFi hotspot or Ethernet connection.
You have a deadline and you have to send a proposal from your laptop as soon as possible. Sure, you could print out the proposal and fax it, but where is the fun in that? Despite the Bluetooth capability on recent models, the modem on the BlackBerry can, unfortunately, only be accessed through the USB cable. Use the following steps to set up your connection:.
Select Connect to the Internet, then Set up my connection manually, then Connect using a dial-up modem, and select your BlackBerry modem from the device list. Enter the phone number for your service provider. The username and password will vary by carrier as well. Cingular just accepts null values for both fields. If you have CDMA service, you can skip this step.
If you have GSM service for your BlackBerry, you will need to add an extra init string for the modem to use when it connects. Check with your provider to get the value that should be used for your service. You should be able to use the new dial-up connection in Network Connections to establish an Internet connection. You can right-click on your new connection and choose Connect. Click Dial without entering a username or password.
If all goes well, you will have an active wireless Internet connection! Access to anything beyond those major protocols may or may not be allowed. Your mileage will vary widely. Pay attention to the details of your data plan, especially when using this hack. As you can imagine, you can consume a good portion of your monthly data allotment using your BlackBerry as a modem. Use these settings to disable the battery-intensive functions—your battery will thank you.
But we all realize that the innovation in the battery industry seems to have almost stagnated. We have seen hard drive capacities skyrocket while their prices have plummeted.
The same cannot be said for the capacity of the batteries we use. We, as BlackBerry users, expect a lot from the batteries in our devices. We want to be able to go on a trip and not worry about remembering the travel charger. And heaven forbid we have to turn wireless off on our device to conserve the battery—oh the horrors! I know we hate to admit it, but the wireless modem in your device is far and away the worst battery hog of all.
In my secondary device, I once turned the wireless off with a full charge and left the device on. When I checked it again a full two weeks later, the device still showed full strength. The backlight consumes a good deal of the battery, too. It sure is easier to look at the screen with it on, but avoid using it when you are in situations when you need your battery to last.
When your device detects that it is in its holster through clever use of a magnet , it immediately goes into a power save mode. The backlight timeout is ignored, the screen is turned off, and it operates on minimal power while in the holster.
Any programs that are running in the background on your device [Hack 6] will require and use system resources to run. Keep these to a minimum. When you have to have it on, minimize its use. That means avoid using programs that use it. This includes the BlackBerry Browser and many of the third-party programs outlined in this book.
Instant messaging applications are notorious for frequent use of the wireless modem while running in the background. This is a serious drain on your battery! The BlackBerry operating system manages memory similar to a PC. Memory is swapped to a flash memory disk as RAM becomes scarcer. Go to the Status item in Options and look for the File Free field. Just like the wireless modem, the Bluetooth function will consume a tremendous amount of your battery.
This is the best way to conserve the battery! You can even set up a different schedule for weekdays and weekends. The browser defaults are certainly not optimal. By changing the settings on your handheld, browsing can be much quicker. The relatively recent addition of the BlackBerry Browser to the device makes it easy to browse web sites wherever you happen to be. Some might argue the built-in browser is probably the most underused program on the device.
By default, the browser will download all images, JavaScript, and stylesheets for each web site you visit. Many of these sites look plain silly on a handheld or are even downright unusable. You can customize the settings on your BlackBerry Browser to provide a quicker, smoother ride no matter what virtual terrain comes your way.
For each image on a web page, your device will have to initiate another HTTP request to retrieve it. On pages with just a few images, this is a serious time consumer. When you visit a web page with images, the text of the page is rendered first and then the images are retrieved and rendered in your browser. When your browser initiates the request for a new image, it has no way of knowing the size it should allocate on the screen for that image, so it ends up allocating a very small amount of screen real estate for it.
All the rest working perfect. Anyone have any advice? My carrier is vodafone south africa. Please advise and help Thanks. I dont need this for large iso files mb I would use it just to download normal files mb.
Because if is not using blackberry APN I will have to pay enormous phone bill. Hi, I am also in Southa Africa and on the Vodacom network. Have followed the instructions religiously but to no avail. I still have the 2. Please advise…. Dear all. I need help. What about BB ? Is there any option like Legacy SB Restore??
Do not worry. Am from south africa using cellc I tried it and it dident work But to. Will try again 2nite and get this one mp3 hehehe But a apn ip could help resolve the problem bewise ;. This hack did not work. Thanks for makin me waste half a day of my life..
I got my recently. Anyone know how to fix this? You could be on 3g or edge network before, but now on gprs which is relatively slow. Or does it only work for mobile downloads? I followed the instruction to the letter on my BB storm 2 but the limit is still there even though I selected the net browser.
What else can I do?
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