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Hey folks, I am back. The holidays treated The Phone Store well this year and we hope you have had a good one as well. I wanted to start 2009 with exciting news for a Blackberry user. It has been reported by Boy Genius that the Blackberry Niagara should be coming to Sprint first quarter.

What is the Blackberry Niagara? The Niagara is a cousin of the Blackberry Bold ATT offers. Some reports are saying it will be EVDO rev A. I hope it is. As some of you may know I loved my 8830, I cherish my Curve, and I really think I will like this upcoming Blackberry.

It is supposed to be on OS 4.7 and have BES 5 support for you Exchange users. I for one can’t wait, I have an upgrade coming soon, and this should be out right in time for that. If you have any questions contact us, or if you are not sold on a Blackberry, TAKE THE CHALLENGE!!!

I am not a Blackberry Jedi, but I do use many of the features on my BES Blackberry and I use many 3rd party applications that have really helped me day to day. When it comes to Blackberry it can get confusing sometimes on what you should or should not install on your new phone. You can read 1 Million articles devoted to Blackberry, self-discover, or you can take recommendations from friends that use their device in similar ways.

First and foremost no matter which Blackberry device (or most Windows Smartphones) you should get Viigo. For me Viigo houses my RSS feeds and keeps me up to date on all the news I care about. I could go into Viigo, search for one of my websites, and Viigo will add to my list of updates. Viigo helped me get a Blu-Ray player, 4 Blu-Ray movies, and HDMI cable, and shipping for under $200. Sometimes as busy people we can’t always read a newspaper, watch the news, or check online for news, but Viigo delivers it to you, and you can read it when you have time.

Any type of GPS navigataion. I have Sprint so TeleNav powers my location finding skills. Coming back from El Paso I was able to give a man in need directions to Pecos with confidence. if you visit their website they are offering a 30 day trial. If you have Verizon, VZNavigator is great. Another option is Google Maps, it is free and it is very helpful if you do not have the other options.

My built in applications I love are Blackberry Messenger, which allows you to Instant Message other Blackberry users as well as send pictures and voice notes. The Calendar and MemoPad are a life saver for me when an appointment comes up, or I have to jot something down and do not have anything else handy. Last, but not least the Password Safe is a great thing to have. Many of us have at least ten different passwords we have to remember for different things, with this you remember one password, and the rest are at your fingertips.

So those are great things to get started. For most questions I refer to Crackberry’s Forums which have a slew of questions and answers as well as tips and tricks. The Blackberry Owner’s Lounge is a good resource for Blackberry information too. As always if you have any questions contact us.

MySpace has really been getting on top of their game lately. Maybe it is because they lost their number one spot to Facebook, or maybe they want to be a truly great utility. A few months ago MySpace launched their Mobile website mobile.myspace.com, which is optimized for viewing on your mobile phone’s screen.

Well, for us Blackberry fans they launched the Blackberry application which is a great way to keep in touch. It is extremely similar to the Facebook app, but it is handy either way. Now MySpace is going to start offering a video service for mobile. According to Pinstack the video service will go to the Blackberry Bold, Palm Centro, Motorola Q9, LG Voyager, Nokia N95, and the Samsung Instinct.

It will be a ad based program, but I will watch or read a fair amount of advertising to get a really helpful tool for my phone. I wish other makers would follow suit and create ad based applications. So hopefully this works as well as I hope. If you have any questions, let us know!

One of my gadgets that gets the amount of love my Blackberry does is my Xbox 360. I have been playing video games since I can remember. I did not own an Atari, but I did have a NES, SNES, N64, and so on. So video games are a part of my life.

As many of us gamers are getting older, work is becoming a bigger part of our lives, and maybe we can’t play as often as we would like. A big part of the Xbox Experience (For me anyways) is being able to play online with friends. And that is where XBerry Live comes in. You can add your friends on XBerry Live and it will tell you there status. For example my friend Clint B Me was last playing Call of Duty and is offline right now.

I do not always want to turn my Xbox on to see who is playing, and with XBerry Live I can see who is playing and what they are currently doing on their Xbox. It is a great application and I have not had it too long, but you can also send your friends a message from the application which will hit their Xbox.

To get XBerry Live you can type http://jxl.me/xberry/xberrylive.jad into your Blackberry’s Browser, oor you can download from The BerryStore m.berrystore.com. As always if you have any questions contact us.

Recently I downloaded the MySpace application for Blackberry. I was a little worried at first because I could not download for 2 days ( I am assuming their servers were loaded to the gills). I for one like MySpace, it is a good place to keep in touch with friends and this application is a good app to follow in Facebook’s footsteps.

I downloaded the app from http://www.blackberry.com/email/myspace. I think you can also download it from the m.myspace.com. The application downloaded okay once I was able to get through and it does not seem like this early version has many glitches.

If you are used to MySpace mobile this may be a little different. The screen is broken up into your Home tab, which includes your status and recent status updates from your friends. My Inbox which has all of your incoming messages. My Friend Requests, My Comments, My Friends, and My Pictures. The application works well and has an easy to navigate interface. So if you have a MySpace account and a Blackberry, this is a must have!

I was reading up on a new application that I thought would be a very helfpul tool for EVERY Blackberry owner to have. It is myBoxTone and it seems to be a diagnostics program to help ensure your Blackberry is running smoothly at all times. If there is anything to threaten that, it would normally tell you how to resolve the issue.

Either way, the good people over at Crackberry have some screenshots of the application in action. According to Crackberry when you click on the icon you receive a list of the alerts, you can select the alert, once that is done it gives suggestions on resolving the issue. For really advanced issues you can even screenshot your Blackberry to send to your company’s tech team, or your carrier’s tech team.

So this should be a really helpful tool for those power users and not so power users. If you are interested click here. If you have any other question please contact us.

I heard about Poynt beta some time ago, but sometimes I am trying out 10 betas at a time, it is hard to really focus on other betas and available programs. So Poynt is basically a GPS/Phone Book application. It is difficult to try anything like this since TeleNav has always been one of my favorite programs for finding directions or points of interest.

Do not get me wrong, there is space on my phone for both, and Poynt is unique enough for it to take up real estate on my home screen. Actually both are part of my main L theme on my phone. Anyways, back to Poynt. Something I really do a lot of on my phone is look up movie times. There is usually a movie that I want to watch, and sometimes when I am out and about town I decide I want to watch one of them.

I have always bookmarked Fandango on my phone and it has worked well, much better than calling the box office number and wading through all the showings. Poynt “PinPoynts”(I spelled it wrong on purpose) my location with GPS, and tells me what is showing close to me. I have a few options, I can select one of the top 10 movies, and Poynt will show me all the times it is playing at all theaters close by. I can browse by theater near me, search movie genres, titles, and theater names.

The other really cool feature are the yellow pages. I can search for a business in a nice clean interface. Both movies and yellow pages will give me directions to my destination. So I have not had this application long, but it is free and it is very cool. To download on your Blackberry point your browser to http://m.mypoynt.com. If you have any questions contact us.

Our phones do so much for us now. Some of us do online banking, read our local newspapers with RSS Feeds, and a million other things. The Apple iPhone(3G) really upped the ante, by giving us a cool all in one device that looked nice and was pretty functional. Don’t get me wrong I love my Blackberry 8830, but the iPhone has really become a very popular multi-faceted device.

So I was reading that cameras will be getting another boost in the near future in cell phones. Of course this is an evolutionary thing and was bound to happen, but with 32GB SD cards becoming available at retail, our phone will soon also be our camera and our multi-media device. It is bound to happen, and when our kids get older and have these all in one devices they will make fun of us for carrying 5 things around.

So we are not where I hope we will be yet, but I can squeeze hours of entertainment out of my Blackberry when I need to. I know people can do the same with iPhones and high end Nokias, Helio Oceans, and so on. If you have an iPhone sync your Itunes and put some music on there, or use the great Roxio media manager for your Blackberry and let it convert your files for you.

So hopefully next year, I will be writing this blog on my phone, uploading high resolution pictures to Myspace, and be able to use a super intuitive interface to control all my media.

I was looking at some pictures on Flickr.com and I found a picture of a Blackberry, by terren in Virginia, and it was titled Modern Camping Tool. I thought it was funny, not because it was so ridiculously far fetched, but because it was fairly true.

When I used to go camping if something bad happened, you had to hope you could make it to a payphone or a nearby store for help. With a cell phone you can send a text from most places, or try to make an emergency call. Now when it comes to GPS you all know who my favorite is, TELENAV, and that could usually get you where you are going or where you want to be.

What else can you use your phone for? Maybe if you have an Otterbox you can crack open shelled nuts with it’s extra strength case. I know I am not the most outdoorsy person, so if I saw a snake, a nut, or plant I was thinking of getting close to or eating, I would try to look it up using Google on my phone and get an guess on how safe or unsafe it is.

So yes, it is not a shovel, or a tent, or a compass, but it is a great tool to have for everyday life, and it should help out for camping too. So Terren in Virginia, thank you for the picture and the inspiration!

I love my Blackberry, but since it is completely wireless I usually do not connect it to my computer and see some of the other stuff it is compatible with. This weekend I was determined to get some movies on my Blackberry.

I have Blackberry Desktop Manager 4.5. I can change the option to synchronize, transfer data from a device to a Blackberry, load applications, backup and restore, and manage my media. This particular version has Roxio Media Manager. Anyways, I was ready to have to Google how to convert files and “hack” my Blackberry to play my media back the way I wanted. I dragged the media to the Media Manager and Roxio did the rest. It asked if I wanted to Convert for Optimal Playback, I checked yes. And a few minutes later I was done. So no extra work required, just drag and drop.

Soon after I was watching Gotham Knight on my phone, I had a ton of music, and was easily able to put my daughter’s cutest pictures on my phone. So I love that my Blackberry helps me save so much time, but I also love that it helps me pass the time as well. As always any questions contact us.