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Good news for those of you who like to use your Blackberry as a media device, Slacker Radio is available as of now on your Blackberry Smartphone. All you have to do is point your phone’s browser over to Slacker.Com and it will download. It is a really cool application to have, and I am not jealous of Pandora on the iPhone anymore.

I did not have an account with Slacker so I just entered my e-mail address, a password, and agreed to the terms and conditions and I was going. I entered my first artist’s name (Radiohead) and I am now listening to House of Cards by Radiohead, and my next song will be a similar genre. You will need a memory card and it asks for 500MB to cache. So I am enjoying it already, and if you have a Blackberry this is a must have!!! If you have any questions contact us.

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 have Pac-Man, Brick Breaker, and Sudoku on my phone. I love Guitar Hero on my XBOX 360, but the mobile version left some to be desired for me. I have found my new favorite mobile game. It is Nintaii. The premise is simple you move a block around and try to drop it into a slot. Sounds easy right, sometimes it is not.

I noticed this game while I was browsing BPlay’s games section. It has high ratings and a co-worker recommended I at least try it out. I did try it and I love it. If you have a Blackberry and have a chance to play games this is one of the coolest ones I have ever tried. It keeps your brain sharp on your downtime, but still gives you a little break from the hustle and bustle of your work. The easiest way to download is to point your browser to BPlay and go through their website to download directly. Also, for some other free games try the BerryStore. If you have any questions contact us, ask for Alex.

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!

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.

Over the past several years the reason some of us buy phones has changed. 10 years ago, you pretty much bought a phone from the carrier that worked in your area. Some of us in smaller towns did not have much choice. Either way most phones you bought about looked the same. As the years have passed, form factor, call quality, camera, and battery life have been factors that way in on us.

With the success of the iPhone I think many companies are currently looking at mobile browsers. T-Mobile customers may not be familiar with this new world, but soon will be with a 3G network finally launching. Example if I went to Myspace on my old Samsung A640, I would get nothing accomplished, I probably would not even to be able to tell who my top friends were. The iPhone has one of the best browsers(Safari Mobile) which allows you to get the desktop experience on your phone.

The next best browser in my opinion is Opera Mini and if if is available on your phone you should download it. It allows you to view many things on your phone and allows you a secure connection to do mobile banking. (Thanks Joe).

So Firefox is getting into the mobile browser business. It is currently my favorite browser, sorry IE8, Opera, Google Chrome, and Safari. It introduced me to tabbed browsing and has a lighter footprint than other browsers. So I am a big Firefox fan, and I am hoping they launch on Blackberry, that would be so awesome. Either way I am looking forward to it and for those of you who do not have Opera Mini and have a phone that supports it, DOWNLOAD IT!!! You will be happy you did.

I came across this fun article and thought I would share some basic cell phone etiquette rules. We all have our personal pet peeves for cell phones and what people should do and should not do with them . It is really funny my father in law hated that I used my phone for e-mail, games, music, new, and so on. He had a really simple ATT phone, and now he has the pleasure of using his Verizon Blackberry with his new job. I think he has seen the light!!!

So anyways here are 6-10.

10. Location There are places where you should use your phone and should not. Of course the movies is one place you shouldn’t. It does not matter how important you are, you can run out and take the phone call.

9. Disturbing Performances I love going to comedy shows and I have on a few occasions seen a person take/make a call during the routine. It is rude, and gives the comedian an extra target to go after. Save yourself the embarrassment and send a text, or leave the room.

8. Ringtones This is a hard one to gauge because everybody has really different tastes and what I feel may be appropriate may not be for you. SO here are my general rules. Do not have a ringtone with curse words when children or elderly people may hear it. Make sure your ringtone is quiet or appropriate for the work environment if you are at work.  You are not at the club you are at your job, so maybe Lil’ Wayne is not he best choice.

7. Texing insignificant conversations I hate it when somebody texts me “Hey”, I reply “What’s going on?” and they say “Nothing”. That is the whole conversation, there is nothing else said, you just made me type on my phone twice for nothing. Give me something significant to reply to.

6. Writing a text or e-mail while somebody is talking to you This is a hard one for me. I have my Blackberry and with it I take pride in responding quickly to e-mails. This becomes a problem when I am visiting with an employee or a customers. I want to reply, but I do not want them to think I am ignoring them. So I go with my instinct and either excuse myself to briefly reply to an important e-mail, or silence my phone and continue my conversation.

So I will continue the list tomorrow and hopefully you are not guilty of the top 5. It is fun to see what we do and do not do.