The GolfBlogger Gets A Blackberry

After slugging along for several years with a basic cell phone and a circa-1999 Palm Pilot, I finally decided to join the 21st century and get a Smart Phone. I spent a couple of weeks trying every Smart Phone on the market: iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre and Blackberry, as well as several proprietary devices. The iPhone lost points for its lack of true multitasking, no physical keyboard and it’s often creepy fanboyz who have turned Apple into a religion with Steve Jobs as the messiah. Android had a lot of apps, but seemed to me somehow unpolished. I’m convinced Windows Mobile is on its way out. I liked the Palm Pre’s operating system, but not the keyboard and the total lack of apps.

So the winner is … (as the headline reveals) the BlackBerry. I got the Tour. It’s got a very easy to use keyboard, a top notch display, an operating system I understand and lots of different applications. With its ability to sync to Outlook and Google Calendars, it’s an awful lot like the Palm Pilot and the Palm Desktop application I’ve grown to know and love. In fact, I find that there’s little or no learning curve.

This evening, I took it out on my daily walk, listening to MP3s, while using the GPS function to track my distance and rate. Meanwhile, it continued to download and notify me of emails and other messages. Very cool.

The best part is that everything now is one place: calendar, Boy schedules, Mrs. Golfblogger work schedule, honeydo lists, notes, contacts, emails and more. It’s got Documents to Go, which I had on my Palm Pilot and use in a variety of situations. I downloaded a free ebook reader from Barnes and Noble and now have a couple of emergency books always on hand. And of course, there’s always the RSS reader and web browsing.

Now what I need to do is to find some cool golf apps … a golf video game for sure, and perhaps a golf GPS application so I can ditch the dedicated GPS unit and just take the Blackberry to the course.