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Okay, it has been announced for a few months. I am eligible for an upgrade (with Sprint) and my inner Crackberry addict is really struggling against my inner “I want every new tech toy that comes out”. I feel committed to Blackberry. I started with the 8830 and now I have the 8330. I have not had it nearly as long as some other addicts, but I do love it just as much.

That “it” I am referring to is the Palm Pre. The coolest phone Sprint has hyped up in a long while. There has not been a really cool consumer type phone that has looked like it was going to live up to the hype since the Fusic. I know it was a few years ago, but it was pretty cool. So the Palm Pre is a touchscreen, slideout QWERTY, angel of a phone.

The Boy Genius has recently put his little paws on the phone and says it is a pretty solid choice. He did not write too much, but says the touchscreen is good. The only gripe he had was with the top row of keys on the QWERTY. I am a BB fan, a Windows 6.5 fan, the new WebOS fan, and an Android fan, It is hard to like all of these things, but relying heavily on e-mail keeps me glued to my BB. So a coin flip may determine whether I get the Pre or not. The other determining factor may be an announcement of another cool device (Blackberry Tour/Niagara) in the coming months. If you have any questions contact us or you can @message me on Twitter (@gizmoalex) or (@phonestore).

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 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.

So the sad news is I have retired my 8830. It served me well while I had it, and I miss it, but I went ahead and started using the 8330 Curve. The good news is I can take advantage of some of the cool things Sprint offers. I can watch Sprint TV, download music from the Sprint Music Store, and NFL Mobile.

I have not really even began to get into what NFL Mobile has to offer, but now I have a great way to see when my team is playing. I signed up for text messages on team news, score updates, and game times. I do not ever have to miss what my Cowboys are doing.

It has so much stuff, Fantasy Football, Scores, Schedules, News, and Video Clips. So if you have a device that supports it and you like Football, download it. If you have any other questions check out Sprint’s website, or 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.

Last time we covered some of the annoying habits we have picked up, or some of the bad habits we need to get rid of. Thanks to this article it has given us a great guide to what we should or should not do.

5. Texting while you are driving. Not only is this a good way to mis-spell a lot of your words while you are typing, but it is a very dangerous thing to do. I am guilty of it, and I have really tried to stop. It is really dangerous. I am usually aware of what is going on around me while I am driving, but texting really takes you out of the game. Not just texting, but e-mailing, Twitter, and so on.

4. Checking your phone at the movies. At Cinemark (The only theater in my town) Front Row Joe says no calling or texting during the movie. It really is annoying when the person at the movies is constantly checking their phone. If you have something so important to tend to, tend to it and skip the movie.

3. Interrupting a conversation by taking a call. This is self-explanatory, most of us have voice-mail for a reason. Let your voice mail pick up. You do not need to stop your conversations to answer every call.

2. Inappropriate Language/Conversation. Nobody wants to know what you did last night with your friends, or how you don’t remember after a certain point. Not only that, but it seems like when you have these conversations they are 10 times louder than a regular conversation. A good rule of thumb is to pretend small children or elderly folks are around.

1. Talking to loudly. This went with number two for me, but you do not have to put your conversation on anybody an a 100 foot radius. I am glad you are important, but I do not care if your pet squirrel zippy is sick, and I do not think the other people at Walgreen’s do either.

So that’s it, a few good rules to not do. Good luck breaking some of these habits if you have them. It is hard, but it is possible. Good luck!!!

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.

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.

We have written a few times about the Samsung Instinct (M-800). It has always been a phone we have anticipated and one I was really looking forward to coming out. It won a few best in shows at some tech conventions earlier this year and we had seen some videos on its performance. The question is did it deliver. The short answer is yes.

The Instinct has been out for some time, and being in the retail world I feel like I can assume it has stood the test of time. It has sold to many many people, and there are not any significant, or even small issues I have faced when dealing with this device. As we all know the iPhone is a media darling. The iPhone is cool, don’t get me wrong, but when you compare it to a more competent device it does not stand up.

In my opinion the biggest issues with the iPhone are the battery, “3g” network, and case fractures. The battery being removable is a bummer, but the real dagger in the heart is the battery life when you are in 3g mode or you have Wi-Fi on. The 3g network with ATT is not as large as Sprint or Verizon, and for such a beautiful device you will probably get small fractures in the plastic shell of your iPone soon after you purchase.

So yes, I think the Instinct is the winner. It is a great device, very responsive, and Sprint has this cool website for more comparisons (I like the music in the removable battery video). If you have not seen an Instinct yet check it out, or contact us and we will gladly set you up with one.