My Palm Treo 650 is a great telephone / pda combo, unfortunately it doesn't have the clean integration into Big Company's MS Exchange environment that the BlackBerry has (e-mail, calendar, to-do, memos, etc....). The rate of messaging, meeting requests, etc... is so rapid without a BlackBerry, you fall out of touch, your calendar becomes obsolete before you know it.
Unfortunately, a BlackBerry is simply not as nice as a Treo 650 for so many purposes. It does have a much nicer web browser - faster rendering, etc.... I certainly don't want to carry a second phone wherever I go. Especially when on the road.
The solution, find the right software to replace the programs I had depended upon in the Treo 650.
I've loaded a few programs so far.
ToDo Matrix - it's by far the most successful (and expensive) program I've added. It allows you to create a two level hierarchy to track your various to-do's. The first level is the cabinet, which might represent: Projects, Personal, Family, Resolutions, Administration, Health, Sales, etc.... The second level is folder within a cabinet, for example: Project A, Project B, Prospect A, Prospect B, etc.... ToDo Matrix is particularly helpful tracking the myriad activities that occur in parallel when running multiple projects or pursuing multiple sales prospects.
What I miss is a Franklin Planner-like Task Manager list, which would sort tasks by A,B, C and then by number within each letter, i.e. A1, A2, A3, etc....
ToDo Matrix does have a very nice delegation function that will send e-mails out to delegates. I haven't experimented enough with it to see how effective it is in tracking progress, etc....
I have also added Ascendo Data Vault to track useful IDs, Passwords and URLs as well as financial information. Data Vault stands apart from many of the BlackBerry password keepers as it's PC companion program can automatically enter user IDs and passwords into webforms.
For entertainment, I have downloaded magmic's Sudoku from the BlackBerry website. It's quite good. My only complaint is that it does not disclose errors when you type in the wrong number.
I also downloaded Yahoo Instant Messenger for Blackberry. This was a mistake. Apparently Big Company's administrators decided Yahoo Instant Messenger should not run on Big Company's network. I deleted the program, but it still shows up in the applications menu - I wonder if I need to reboot the device - something I haven't had to do yet, but suppose I should learn.
Quite frankly, the ToDo Matrix and DataVault are the most useful programs I can imagine. Others exist and I will experiment with them over time.
I am disappointed that there does not appear to be a program that integrates with Quicken 2007 for the BlackBerry -- however there are some that import the data. I'll have to experiment with them.
Regards, makingourway
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