New World, and other discoveries

That would have been the headline in 1492. My goals are much more modest. I set out every day to find things that are useful in my little piéd a terré. Since Monday was Columbus Day (not a holiday unless you're a banker or a mail carrier, for the most part) I thought I'd share some of my recent discoveries with you. Bear with me, there's some techie stuff on here and I know you're not all fans.

www.dictionary.com has released a free dictionary/thesaurus for the Blackberry. It's a link on their website, and after you download it, it upgrades it when you open it for the first time. Great for those times when fantastic just doesn't seem superlative enough... gotta love the thesaurus!

A company called Elecite has released a new free theme in honor of their one year anniversary that works on almost all Blackberry models except the earlier pearls. It's very sleek and has some very nice icons. I found the link on BlackberryRocks.com in today's blog entry.

My friend Lisa has joined with some other very creative folk to launch a new website called cocodot.com, which has gorgeous graphic and photography based cards and invitations, much better than the free stuff you find on Hallmark or American greetings. Check them out!

Drivesafe.ly is a website that is promoting the adoption of safe hands-free driving. To that end, they've made their application beta public~~ it works so far on Blackberries and Android based phones. Basically, it will tell you out loud when you have a new text, who it's from, and will also read the the first 25 words, free of charge! They're even doing a promotion, that if you spread the word, they'll upgrade you to the paid version as a gift! I did it and so far am very pleased. My only gripe is that the program has not yet figured out how to read MMS messages, which is how the majority of my emails get delivered to my phone.

On the subject of phones, there's a very legal loophole these days on T-mobile. As you know from earlier posts, I have a Curve 8320, which comes with Wi-Fi. Because I called T-Mobile and told them I would be using the wi-fi, they added a "feature enabler" to my phone, and sent the service books for it. And because data over wi-fi is unlimited, they tagged my account as "unlimited data." Well, I've come to find out that virtually every program that requires a data plan now works on my phone with no problems, even though I don't have a data plan. I think that's because it can access wap instead of the blackberry server, without issue. Woo Hoo...

So I'm very lucky that I now have ALL the functionalities of a smartphone. When I was having a problem with messages not getting delivered, I called to have the service books re-sent and asked about the 'unlimited data' tag on my account. The rep told me, "good for you, you found a loophole!" So I guess they know about it but keep it hush-hush. We started talking about all the apps I have on my phone and she actually asked me where I found them all, because she couldn't believe I had 50 free apps on my phone.  I found it pretty funny that a T-Mo rep was asking ME for info!!

By the way, there is a limit. I did have to shuffle things around and take a few things off...I had so many apps on the phone that I ran out of memory, so I had to prioritize what I really needed and what could go on and off as needed. In this case, you should save the files to your PC so you can uninstall and reinstall them using the Desktop Manager as needed. It's much harder with the OTA apps ~for those I had to save the email link in my messages.

Anyway, the reason I'm telling you this is not to get you to dump your data plan (if you have one)!!! It's to let people who are trying to watch expenses, like me, without data plans, know that if you tell T-mobile you want to make use of your wi-fi but seem to be having issues, they may re-send your service books and turn on your blackberry feature enabler function. You never know!

I also learned on twitter about a new service application, also still in Beta, that will back up your phone contents to the cloud.... presented by Best Buy but open to anyone, not just their customers. It's free, and it's called MiQ. I downloaded it, and so far, so good!

ReQall is free, and is a great organizer, as well. It also lives on the phone and in the cloud, but is more to do with calls, calendar and tasks than backing up the phone.

See? There's lots of stuff out there, all you have to do is look.

I recommend Crackberry.com, BerryReview.com, BlackberryRocks.com,  Blackberry App world (Free section) and following all of the above on twitter, that way the info comes to you. That's how I get it. I may have lots of time but I don't want to spend it looking for stuff, I let stuff find ME! As always, if you need to know where to find something, email me and ask, I'll do what I can to help you find what you need.