My Five Favourite BlackBerry Applications

Ah, it’s time for the ubiquitous “top 5″ list. I’ve avoided blogs like this before as they are a bit tacky and are often incredibly biased. Having said that, I have owned a BlackBerry for about 10 months and in that time I’ve come to depend on a few applications that I really wouldn’t like to do without.

So, without further ado, let’s dive into my list of ‘must-have’ BlackBerry applications:

#1 UberTwitter

This is a fairly new application and is the final stages of beta testing. It’s probably the best twitter client I’ve seen on Blackberry. It has numerous features including the GPS based “find tweets near me” and its own picture upload service which can optionally include a map of where you were when you sent the picture. It’s fast slick and hard to find fault with.

Before UberTwitter came along, there was the god-awful TwitterBerry application that drove me mad with frustration.

UberTwitter is available for free but is advert supported. An annual subscription of $4.99 is required to remove them which is very reasonable.

(A late Twitter client newcomer is TwixTreme which is free , without adverts and is really rather nifty)

UberTwitter’s Website

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#2 Viigo

It would be incredibly easy to peg Viigo as nothing more than an RSS reader but it is so much more.

Sure, I use it mostly for the RSS reader as it’s a quick and cheap way to read articles from sites that I’m interested in. Exploring further, though, you can set up your Twitter account and perform basic tasks such as reading your timeline and creating new tweets. There’s also support for weather, entertainment, stocks, travel and more.

Your favourite site doesn’t have an RSS feed? No problem, there’s an option to import webpages and it’ll do its best to strip extraneous content and leave you with the text. You have options to open up each article in the BlackBerry browser if so desired. I find myself in Viigo at least once a day.

Viigo is currently free. There are very small and unobtrusive adverts at the top of each page.

Viigo’s Website

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#3 Antair Spam Filter

I get a lot of spam. And it’s incredibly annoying. Its even more annoying on my Blackberry because it beeps at me and flashes its red light until I do something about it. I used to get roughly 1 email every 5 minutes or so before I installed this application.

It is a very simple application that sits in the background and works transparently. It’s very effective and has virtually eliminated spam on my Blackberry. You can browse captured emails and restore them with a few clicks. The default settings are very strong and it’ll consider many semi-spam emails as spam. By this, I mean emails from Amazon, PayPal, etc. You can turn down the strength. I took it down a notch but I’m quite happy for it to grab those mass-mails as I can read them on my Mac and really only want essential mail on my BlackBerry anyway.

It has all the feature’s you’d expect: email/domain whitelisting and blacklisting and the ability to set up ‘tags’ so that if your server prepends suspicious emails with [SPAM] it will grab those too.

It’s quite expensive for a mobile application but it’s worth it. It’s a one off fee of $49.95 and they offer a free 30 day trial.

Antair’s Website

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#4 Bolt Browser

It’s no secret that the BlackBerry browser is quite poor. It struggles with any complex websites. It won’t bother with flash, and often renders websites so badly you can’t read them. There is a “column view” which removes some formatting and displays the site as a long column but it’s bothersome and slow. I have javascript switched off as it substantially increases load times as it downloads and processes these scripts. Without a hint of exaggeration, a complex page with javascript can take around 40 seconds to load fully when scripting is enabled. It’s really unacceptable by any standard and even less so when compared to mobile Safari on the iPhone.

Thankfully, there is the Bolt Browser application. It’s a generic application for all mobile devices much like Opera Mobile but it does have a version optimized for BlackBerry in which it retains familiar key functions such as “b” for “go to page bottom” and “t” for, yes – you’ve guessed it “go to page top”, etc. The BlackBerry’s trackerball has full control over the cursor and it snaps to links as you pass them by with the cursor.

It uses its own servers as a proxy which means its incredibly fast as it compresses the code and images before it gets to your phone. It has all the usual features such as history, bookmarks, etc. I tend to use this for browsing our forums.

It’s currently free and doesn’t have any adverts. Thoroughly recommended.

Bolt’s Website

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#5 WordPress

This is a recently released application and its currently in beta testing although it is very stable. While it won’t win any awards for its interface, it is a very convenient way of blogging on the go. Much like the iPhone application, you can add and edit posts and manage comments. You can attach photos and images from your BlackBerry very easily.

A minor niggle – which is mostly to do with the BlackBerry dialogue windows – is that the quick keys ‘b’ and ‘t’ don’t work when browsing the file system as they do normally. Usually, when you are presented with a list of files, you can hit ‘b’ and go right to the bottom of the file list. As photos taken with the camera are ordered numerically, the last picture you take is right at the bottom. When you have a few hundred photos it is very bothersome to scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. Worse still, there is no preview so you never really know if you have the correct picture or not.

That aside, it’s very nice to have the ability to blog within arms reach. I’ve fired off a few posts on it for this very blog over the past few weeks.

Wordpress for Blackberry

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So there you have it. I could probably list a dozen more applications that I use infrequently but these five are in-use daily and I wouldn’t want to be without them.