Blackberry Blues

I got a Blackberry a couple of weeks ago and it's been a difficult transition. Smart actually sends an "After Sales" person to help migrate files over to the new phone.

I kept it simple. All I wanted were my Treo's Calendar and Contacts. These are files that started when I got my first Nokia 9000 Communicator in June 2000 so that's a lot of stuff. The data has successfully made several device transitions over the years, eventually into my current Treo 650.

The Contacts issue was that the Palm OS has far more fields than the BB. So none of the Birthdays, Spouses, Kids, etc. made it from Treo to BB. OK, so maybe some of that is not too important but the killer was that the BB would only take one mobile phone number and one e-mail address, and in doing so wiped out quite a bit of data from my Address Book.

The Calendar fared worse. The BB first showed that it got all the data but a few hours later, all had been erased save for data from the past month. After Sales Guy tried twice unsuccessfully. Worse, somehow during the transfers, certain events in the Calendar became double entries. It seemed that whenever I had used the Details field in the Event, the event got re-entered, this time with the details as just part of the Event, shown in parentheses. Worse, there was no coherent pattern to which Events were repeated and which were left alone.

So I tried a new method.

I first downloaded PocketMac for BB from the BB website. Separately, I synced all my data from Treo's Palm Desktop to Mac's Calendar and Address Book software. That actually synced very well, except now the Mac Calendar has double entries and is a mess.

From the Mac Calendar and Address Book, I synced with the BB using PocketMac.

The Address Book made it with more info, but I am still working on sorting out exactly what fields were left out and which made the entire trip.

The Calendar was a mess with all the double entries and BB still had issues with disappearing events.

So today, I have three gadgets to carry around. My Globe is a Samsung U600, my Smart is the BB and my old Smart line is the Treo. I still use the Treo as my Calendar. One of these days, I'm getting the new Communicator and moving all that data over to that device so I can finally retire my Treo.

As for the BB, bottom line is: it's a one-trick pony.