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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.

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.

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!

As some of you may know I live in Victoria Texas. If you have been following the hurricane, we were on its path to be hit hard two days ago. We have a few retail stores in the Rockport and Victoria area. So I gathered some of our important things like money, phones, and computers. I drove them to safe keeping around our corporate location in San Antonio.

So after that the plan was to head to Beaumont, it was out of the way of the projected path at the time and we were going to visit my father in law and try to wait for the storm to pass. Sure enough when we were close to Houston plans changed. My father in law called and said the storm’s path had changed and Beamont was being evacuated.

It was my wife, daughter, and 2 dogs, and we were not too sure what to do next. We did not know where we were, and how to get to our plan B, Dallas. Thankfully Telenav was guiding us to Beaumont and it guided us to the Dallas area. There was no lag, and without it I would have been in a bad situation. There are many applications out there and Telenav is an application that has worked very well for me many many times.

If you do not have the option for Telenav there are many other decent GPS alternatives out there. It worked out so great for me, we didn’t have to go to a store and fight all the people evacuating from Houston for a mao. Telenav got me and my loved ones to a safe place, and I will continue to use it as long as I have a phone.

I was reading an article in the NY Times, and it was about a new parking system they want to use in San Francisco. Here is a quick rundown of how it will work; the city will set up small sensors at the parking stations that will be able to differentiate if anybody is parked there or not, that message will transmit to either a cell phone or a street sign about the open spot. In some areas this may not seem like such a big deal, but in New York they estimate up to 45% of the traffic in some areas is generated by people circling streets.

How cool would that be? You are driving and using your TeleNav on your Blackberry and it guides you to the closest parking spot. Now before my TeleNav, I was notorious for getting lost, but even now when I find my destination I do not always know how to get in the parking garage. This really would help so many people out. This is exactly what I love about technology, people are looking at our problems and they are thinking out of the box to fill our need.

I at times have to travel and when I travel I am usually going to places that are about 100% unfamiliar. Thankfully since I am not great (or even good) at reading maps, I have Sprint Navigation/TeleNav. I have tried a few other options like Blackberry Maps, Google Maps, and even Garmin, but TeleNav is my favorite.

I had to go to a meeting in San Antonio a few weeks ago and I used TeleNav the second I got into the car. For those of you who have not been in San Antonio recently there is a healthy amount of road work being done. Naturally, my exit was blocked and TeleNav found my new destination and redirected me so I was still at my meeting with 5 minutes to spare. Don’t worry you do not have to look at your phone every 3 seconds, listen and TeleNav will tell you to turn and give you spoken directions on where to go.

There are so many good things about TeleNav. One of my favorites is that it will help you find lower gas prices. I recently went to El Paso and on the way back I stopped in Van Horn and the gas was 4.29. This seemed really high considering I was averaging around 3.79-3.89 at most pumps. I searched for the lowest gas in that town using TeleNav and it guided me two blocks away where the gas was 3.99. There are a slew of good things you could find with TeleNav so if you don’t have it, try it out. It is really a great product and I strongly recommend it.

While I have had the sheer joy of moving this past weekend (do you taste a hint of sarcasm in my tone?), I also enjoyed giving out directions to my new home.  You know what I’m talking about…take the second left, go through the stop sign, no, no…the second left, etc.  Well, that is where I have a leg up on my non- BlackBerry neighbors.  As my brother was coming back from a week long vacation, he promptly asked me for directions to my new house.  He’s a great guy, but he couldn’t find his way across the street, so his Sprint Telenav is a godsend.  But this was not the program of choice today; it was his good old fashion BlackBerry Maps.  I simply found the address and with one click of my menu button, I was able to send my brother the exact location.  Upon receiving it on his BlackBerry, he clicked on the link and started using his BlackBerry Maps GPS navigation.  Within 15 minutes, and not a single wrong turn, he and his family showed up at our front door.  As the weekend passed I used this method at least a half dozen times, all with the same outcome…smiling faces at my new front door!    In this case, the simplicity of using BlackBerry Maps made me take a second look at the application as a whole.  While it is not as robust as Telenav, it certainly will remain on my BlackBerry.