Blackberry Apps Update

When my son graduated from high school recently, I noticed he’d go without a cell phone for long periods of time, so as a graduation gift I added him to my cell phone plan. Included in the plan were matching 8830′s, which is really just a bigger version of the Pearl with more visual space.

ÜberTwitter a VERY function packed twitter application! I’ve talked about Twitterberry in a previous post. Using it for a while, I found uploading posts with pictures horribly unstable and difficult to do. UberTwitter handles this with ease. I’ve tried a lot of different twitter applications and Ubertwitter is the most stable, user friendly twitter application for Blackberry.

Qik – Quk is a free video streaming application. You can record live video, so I’m REALLY interested in this app. I want it to work more than it does. I’ve had problems with the uploading/live portion of the application. On the Curve it doesn’t seem ready for prime time.

BeeJiveIM is a multi-platform IM client for both Blackberry and iPhone devices. I recently reviewed Palringo, another multi-platform client. I searched for another program because Palringo has been plagued with connection issues that make it unusable for me. Enter BeeJiveIM. No connection errors, a more user friendly interface (though it does look like an AIM client from 1995), and it is packed full of features you can read about here. The downside is that BeeJiveIM isn’t free. On the Blackberry it’s 19.99 for a single phone and 29.99 for a transferable license. But it’s free to try for 30 days.

WordPress for Blackberry – is a mobile blogging client that has a surprising number of features for an open source application. Not only can you write/publish/save drafts, you can upload pictures straight from your phone. This is truly mobile blogging. If you add twitter tools to your wordpress install you could actually publish to twitter and wordpress at the same time. Blogging couldn’t get much easier. You can see my test post at my test blog.

VR+ Voice – according to their website, with this application you can:

1. Record a voice note, lecture or an interview. With your mobile device record anything on-the-go.
2. E-mail your voice recordings for playing back on the PC or mobile. On-the-Fly conversion to Mp3.
3. Send the recording whenever and wherever you are. No typing, no printing involved. Mp3 format makes the recording easy to send and easy to listen to.
4. Share your recordings with friends in Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogger.
5. Let your friends hear your notes by sharing them in major social networks directly from your smartphone.
6. Create your own podcasts on-the-go, upload and share them right from a mobile device.
7. Enjoy listening to podcasts? Well, now you can make your own podcasts, listen to them and let others hear your reviews, advice or impressions. Make your recordings public and let others hear you!

I really do like this application. It allows me to make a mobile podcast any time I want to and send it to twitter (and blogger, facebook, and myspace). That being said, it isn’t perfect in doing so. If you autopost to twitter you get a standard tweet that says:

“New VR+ voice recording URL: http://examplepodcastlink.com Listen to this voice note! I made it with VR+ installed on my BlackBerry”

I would rather post what the podcast is about, rather than a commercial for VR+, so I upload it to Shapeservices.com and then grab the the url via a saved bookmark to my public podcast area. Hopefully ShapeServices will fix this in the future. Free software I could kind of see having this limitation, but I paid for this app (it’s free to try for 7 days, buy for $29).

Google Voice for Blackberry
If you’ve recently signed up for the new Google Voice service and you have a Blackberry, you’re in luck!

“Google Voice gives you one number for all your phones, voicemail as easy as email, and lots of cool calling features like voicemail transcripts, call screening and blocking, conference calling and more.”

With the Blackberry app you can:

• Make calls and send SMS from your Google Voice number
• Listen to your voicemail and read voicemail transcripts
• Manage your Inbox and view Call History

Beware, it’s new so there are bugs.

Lastly, I just wanted to make a comment about the various app stores. I recently bought an Ipod touch. Many of the programs talked about in this post have iPod/iPhone versions. The only difference is… THE PRICE. The VR+ app at the iTunes app store is .99 and BeJiveIM is $9.99! Note to Blackberry, higher prices in your apps store won’t cause people flock to it.

Previous Blackberry posts:
My Top BlackBerry Pearl Applications
Updated: Another Reason To Love My Blackberry
Part Three: More Blackberry Pearl Applications