BlackBerry Hacks | O'Reilly Media

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If you just got your first BlackBerry, you've probably already figured out the basics. The nice thing about the BlackBerry is that is has something for every type of user—from "wet behind the ears" newbies to the most advanced alpha-geeks. This chapter uncovers some of the tricks you may not have known your device was capable of. New users will be happy to know what's just below the surface: a clipboard [Hack #2] , multitasking [Hack #6] , and wireless calendaring [Hack #4] . The hackers in the crowd might like to display the signal strength in decibels instead of bars [Hack #17] , use your computer as a wireless headset [Hack #16] , or get mobile Internet access on your computer [Hack #9] . Dive right in—there's something for everyone.

You may know how to choose a voice plan, but what type of data plan do you need?

Mobile phones have been around long enough for people to know the ins and outs of a voice plan. By now, most of us realize what type of mobile phone user we are, how many minutes we're likely to use in a month, and we can pick an appropriate voice plan and realize the implications.

But what about the data plan? How much data are you likely to use with your BlackBerry? What are the factors that should contribute to this decision?

One of the reasons BlackBerry has raced on the scene and become so popular is its "push" technology. Access to email from a mobile device has been around for quite a while, but it's always been a "pull" technology. That is, when you wanted to check your email on your mobile phone, you access a mail application and then poll your server to see if any new mail has arrived. This process is usually slow due to network latency and hardware of small devices.

Research In Motion (RIM), the company that makes the BlackBerry, stepped in and developed a push technology that delivers new emails to your mobile device. This allows you to set up alerts and even be proactively notified when you receive certain email messages

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If you just got your first BlackBerry, you've probably already figured out the basics. The nice thing about the BlackBerry is that is has something for every type of user—from "wet behind the ears" newbies to the most advanced alpha-geeks. This chapter uncovers some of the tricks you may not have known your device was capable of. New users will be happy to know what's just below the surface: a clipboard [Hack #2] , multitasking [Hack #6] , and wireless calendaring [Hack #4] . The hackers in the crowd might like to display the signal strength in decibels instead of bars [Hack #17] , use your computer as a wireless headset [Hack #16] , or get mobile Internet access on your computer [Hack #9] . Dive right in—there's something for everyone.

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You may know how to choose a voice plan, but what type of data plan do you need?

Mobile phones have been around long enough for people to know the ins and outs of a voice plan. By now, most of us realize what type of mobile phone user we are, how many minutes we're likely to use in a month, and we can pick an appropriate voice plan and realize the implications.

But what about the data plan? How much data are you likely to use with your BlackBerry? What are the factors that should contribute to this decision?

One of the reasons BlackBerry has raced on the scene and become so popular is its "push" technology. Access to email from a mobile device has been around for quite a while, but it's always been a "pull" technology. That is, when you wanted to check your email on your mobile phone, you access a mail application and then poll your server to see if any new mail has arrived. This process is usually slow due to network latency and hardware of small devices.

Research In Motion (RIM), the company that makes the BlackBerry, stepped in and developed a push technology that delivers new emails to your mobile device. This allows you to set up alerts and even be proactively notified when you receive certain email messages [Hack #30] .

While this approach to mobile email has been wildly successful, your device's data usage using this model will be far greater since you are not in control of when to use the data connection. This is analogous to accessing the Internet with broadband versus dial-up. Your BlackBerry is like broad-band—it is on all the time.

If you know you'll be using your device with your company's BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), your data usage could be significantly lower. Introduced with BES 4.0 is the BlackBerry Router, a piece of software that is designed to know at any given time the best (and cheapest) route to communicate to your device. When you're in the office and cradled, the BlackBerry Router can detect this condition and use the local IP network to send data to your device through the USB cable on your PC instead of "over the air."

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Did you know the BlackBerry has a clipboard? Use it to save tons of keystrokes.

As convenient as RIM has made typing on your handheld, it's still—let's face it—typing on a handheld. Any time you can get away without typing text on your device or using shortcuts [Hack #7] , you should. This will allow you to be more efficient and crank out more messages from your device with less effort.

One of the most useful ways to save keystrokes is by using BlackBerry's built-in clipboard to copy and paste text from one place to another on your device. Although this is a trivial task on an actual computer, it is a little more difficult on your BlackBerry. Committing these steps to memory now will definitely go a long way in your becoming the ultimate BlackBerry road warrior.

Once you have identified the text you would like to copy, you need to select it, just like on your computer. Position the cursor to the first character in the text you'd like to select. Remember that holding down the Alt key while scrolling with the trackwheel moves your cursor horizontally. Once you've positioned the cursor on the first character of your selection, hold down the Alt key, click the trackwheel once, then release the Alt key.

This puts the BlackBerry in selection mode. Notice the cursor covers only the bottom half of a character when in this mode as shown in Figure 1-1.

Figure 1-1: Selection mode

Use the trackwheel to select the text you'd like to copy to the clipboard by scrolling up and down. Notice that entire lines are selected when you scroll. Hold down the Alt key while you scroll with the trackwheel to move horizontally on the current line one character at a time.

Once you've selected all the text you'd like to copy, click the trackwheel once to bring up the menu. Notice that when you are in "selection mode" the menu will have a couple extra items with the default selection being Copy. Choose Copy to send the selected text to the clipboard (see Figure 1-2). Notice after you copy text you are no longer in selection mode.

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Cut the course with shortcuts—perhaps the most powerful and underused feature of the device.

The BlackBerry has a very rich system of using shortcuts and hotkeys to quickly navigate inside of applications, and to launch applications from the Home screen. This hack is based largely on the compilation of hotkeys and shortcuts that Mark Rejhon has been maintaining on the very useful BlackBerry Forums web site (http://www.blackberryforums.com/). Mark maintains several FAQs that are of interest to BlackBerry newbies and veterans.

To use application launch shortcuts, you may need to disable the ability to dial from the Home screen [Hack #18] in the Phone application's options. This will mean you can't just start dialing numbers when you pick up an idle BlackBerry, but you can quickly tap the top button on your BlackBerry to put you into the Phone application, and thus be ready for number input there as well.

The Alt key is on the left side of your keyboard. It is just below the A and to the left of the Z. The Shift key is the same as the zero on your keyboard, or it may also be on the right of the keyboard, left of the Power Button and right of the spacebar.

When I say Alt-M, I mean press and hold Alt and tap M, in that order.

When I say Alt-M,O,O, I mean to press and hold Alt, then type M, O, and O, in that order. Release Alt when you are done typing.

These shortcuts have been tested on a 7290. Because of keyboard layout differences, some of these shortcuts will not work on a 7100 series device, such as the 7100g.

Hold the Alt key while you use the trackwheel to scroll horizontally through any field where you can enter or view text. This works in many places: when you're editing a sentence in an email, a memo, or even a form on a web page. You can always move character by character by using Alt and scrolling the wheel. When viewing a message, list, or web page, you can scroll by page instead of by line by holding down the Alt key and scrolling. Hold the Shift key while you are scrolling through several items to select them all. This is useful for processing multiple messages at once. Table 1-1 lists some more navigation shortcuts.

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Have your calendar items sync to your server-based mailbox continuously over the air.

If you are a BlackBerry Enterprise Server user, you know how quickly your emails arrive to your device—almost immediately. In earlier versions of BlackBerry Enterprise Server, synchronization of all items except email had to occur through a USB or serial connection using Intellisync with Desktop Manager. With the introduction of Version 2.1 of the BES, it is possible to update your calendar items over the air without cradling your BlackBerry.

Unless your device has been provisioned over the air to a 4.0 BES server, by default, your calendar items on your device are synchronized to your Outlook calendar only when you cradle and run an Intellisync using Desktop Manager. You can change that so your calendar items synchronize continuously over the air. This turns out to be quite a convenience for heavy calendar users and for users who have multiple people managing their schedule using a server-based calendar.

To set up wireless calendaring, you'll need to cradle your device and bring up Desktop Manager. Double-click on the Intellisync icon, and then click Configure PIM. Under Handheld Applications, select Calendar, and then click on the Choose button on the top-right side of the dialog box. As shown in Figure 1-5, instead of choosing Microsoft Outlook (which is the default), choose BlackBerry Wireless Sync, and then click OK.

If BlackBerry Wireless Sync is not on the list, you either are not a BES user, your BES is using a version that doesn't support the wireless calendar feature, or your administrator has configured the server not to support it.

Figure 1-5: Configuring wireless calendaring

After clicking OK, a dialog box will appear saying that you need to synchronize to enable wireless calendaring. Because there are often many calendar items in your calendar that would take a lot of airtime and server resources to sync over the air, Desktop Manager has you do a cradled sync one last time before enabling the wireless calendar feature. For syncing a large number of items, this type of sync is far more efficient.

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Remove your rarely used icons from your main screen.

Part of the success of the BlackBerry has been because of RIM's decision to use J2ME (Java 2 Micro Edition) as the OS on its devices. This decision immediately made a tremendous amount of J2ME software available for the BlackBerry and established the BlackBerry as a leading platform for application development. There are two chapters of this book dedicated to various third-party applications.

With all the programs that come with the BlackBerry software itself, plus all the third-party applications you're likely to install, it won't be long before you amass quite a collection. Each of these applications installs an icon on your Home screen consuming valuable screen real estate. These icons range from visually appealing to absurdly unrecognizable.

All these icons can make your Home screen difficult to navigate. Just when you get used to your icons being in a certain place, you install another application and all the icons shift around the screen so the Calculator icon shows up in the first instead of the last column. Chaos!

Fortunately, a little known feature of BlackBerry allows you to create some order in your icon wasteland by rearranging the icons and hiding others so they don't even appear at all.

Let's say you often search for messages from the Home screen by clicking the Search icon. You do it so often that you'd like to have that icon in a much more prominent position than the last row where it is by default. Here are the steps to move that Search icon to the first row right beside the Messages application.

From the Home screen, position the cursor on the Search icon (the magnifying glass).
While pressing the Alt key, click the trackwheel one time. A "hidden" menu appears as shown in Figure 1-8.
Select Move Application. A border appears around the Search icon, indicating you're moving the icon.

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"Minimize" programs using the BlackBerry equivalent of Windows's Alt-Tab.

As BlackBerry users, we marvel at the efficiency that the BlackBerry provides. This efficiency causes even the slightest delay to seem like an eternity. Using the BlackBerry Browser to view a slowly responding web site can be frustrating when you're used to the quick and immediate access that the BlackBerry provides to most data.

It turns out that the BlackBerry OS provides an easy way to multitask by sending applications to the background. This method is analogous to the Alt-Tab functionality that Microsoft Windows provides.

Let's say you're using the BlackBerry Browser to access Painfullyslowsite.com. Rather than stare at a blank screen with a slowly moving progress bar across the bottom, you can respond to some emails and have the web site load in the background. To switch to the Messages application, hold the Alt key, and then press and release the Escape key. As you continue to keep the Alt key down, a list of icons appears, as shown in Figures 1-14 and 1-15. Each icon represents an application that can currently be switched to. Use the trackwheel to choose the program you'd like to switch to (the Messages program in this case), and then release the Alt key.

This sends the BlackBerry Browser to the background, and the Messages application is started and brought to the foreground. Similar to Microsoft Windows and other modern operating systems, these applications in the background continue to execute even though they aren't visible.

This process is called preemptive multitasking, which means the operating system uses an algorithm to intelligently decide which application gets access to system resources such as processor and memory. Typically, foreground applications receive a higher priority for getting access to resources than a background application.

Figure 1-14:

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Use abbreviations for commonly typed words to save time (and your thumbs).

You already realize by now that one of the main features that sets a BlackBerry apart from other handhelds is its keyboard. Its innovative keyboard design has won over millions of users because RIM was able to get a full QWERTY keyboard on a small handheld PDA. You can walk in any airport in the world and see that distinctive thumb-typing all around you.

But even as simple as the BlackBerry makes entering keystrokes, typing a long email is still cumbersome. A nifty feature called AutoText can alleviate some of that burden by replacing abbreviations with full text. This ends up saving valuable keystrokes by letting you type less.

RIM conveniently provides a slew of built-in AutoText entries that you may have already benefited from without even knowing it. For example, when you type "arent" into a new message, it immediately becomes "aren't." There are 108 built-in entries that provide corrections for common misspellings, add proper punctuation, and provide commonly used text snippets that you're likely to use when you type.

You'll definitely want to add your own custom entries to make shortcuts for text you commonly type. Suppose you often find yourself typing your mailing address into the mail messages you send via your BlackBerry. Here are the steps to create an AutoText entry to simplify that.

You'll find the AutoText feature in the Options section off the Home screen. Once you are in the AutoText program, click the trackwheel once to bring up the menu. Choose New (see Figure 1-16).

Figure 1-16: Adding a new AutoText entry

The configuration screen appears. Let's say you want your full mailing address to appear when you type "myaddr." Type "myaddr" in the Replace field, and then type your address in the With field, as shown in Figure 1-17.

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Your device has a hidden Event Log that can be viewed using a certain key combination.

Similar to the event log on a Windows computer, there is an Event Log on your BlackBerry device where applications and the BlackBerry operating system itself can log information. Not only does this provide a central place to view all events from the system and applications, but it allows application developers to use an easy and consistent API for logging events so that each developer doesn't have to create his own.

You can view the Event Log on your device and even filter certain events, copy them to the clipboard—even email the entire log to someone. You won't find an icon for the Event Log viewer program. You'll have to enter a "secret" key combination to get it to appear.

From your Home screen, type the following key sequence: Alt-L,G,L,G. This should bring up the Event Log viewer as shown in Figure 1-19.

Figure 1-19: The Event Log program

From within the Event Log, you can view the details of each event by pressing the Enter key. Figure 1-20 shows the details of an event.

You can copy specific events to the clipboard on your device by clicking the trackwheel when viewing the details of an event and selecting Copy Event. From the main viewer, you can copy a summary of the current day's events to the clipboard by using the trackwheel to access the menu and selecting Copy Today's Contents. Once the summary is on your clipboard, you can paste it into any other program, including in a new message, by using the trackwheel menu and choosing Paste.

Figure 1-20: The details of a particular event

When you access the Event Log, the program reads the current events and displays them on the screen. As you are viewing the events, additional events may have been logged since you started the program. Choose Refresh from the trackwheel menu to reread the events to make sure you're displaying the most recent events.

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When you're in a bind, tether your laptop to your BlackBerry and connect at modem speeds.

Imagine you are in a remote location, far, far away from the nearest WiFi hotspot or Ethernet connection. You have a deadline and you have to send a proposal from your laptop as soon as possible. Sure, you could print out the proposal and fax it, but where is the fun in that? The BlackBerry 7290 and 7100 come with a built-in modem that can be accessed through the USB cable. It won't connect at EDGE or EV-DO speeds (yet!), but this hack can come in handy in certain situations.

The technique of using a mobile phone's data connection [Hack #1] is commonly known as "tethering." Normally this is done through a wireless Bluetooth connection on a mobile phone. Despite the Bluetooth capability on recent models, the modem on the BlackBerry can, unfortunately, only be accessed through the USB cable.

You'll need to set up a dial-up connection on your Windows machine to use the BlackBerry modem. When you installed the BlackBerry Desktop Manager, it should have automatically installed the modem drivers to use with your device, and you should have a modem called "Standard Modem" in the Phone and Modem Options section of your Control Panel. The drivers are located in the following folder: C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research In Motion\Modem Drivers. Use the following steps to set up your connection:

Connect your BlackBerry to your computer using the standard USB cable that came with your device and start the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software.
Go to the Control Panel, then Network Connections, and select Create a New Connection.
Select Connect to the Internet, then Set up my connection manually, then Connect using a dial-up modem, and select your BlackBerry modem from the device list.

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Use these settings to disable the battery-intensive functions—your battery will thank you.

As far as batteries on mobile devices go, the BlackBerry's is pretty good. But we all realize that the innovation in the battery industry seems to have almost stagnated. We have seen hard drive capacities skyrocket while their prices have plummeted. The same cannot be said for the capacity of the batteries we use.

We, as BlackBerry users, expect a lot from the batteries in our devices. We want to be able to go on a trip and not worry about remembering the travel charger. And heaven forbid we have to turn wireless off on our device to conserve the battery—oh the horrors!

This hack explains which functions should be avoided when you know you're going to be without a charger for a while and you need to stretch your battery life to the limit.

Turn wireless off: I know we hate to admit it, but the wireless modem in your device is far and away the worst battery hog of all. This will probably be called blasphemous by some, but when you're in a bind, turn the wireless off. In my secondary device, I once turned the wireless off with a full charge and left the device on. When I checked it again a full two weeks later, the device still showed full strength.
Never use the backlight: The backlight consumes a good deal of the battery, too. It sure is easier to look at the screen with it on, but avoid using it when you are in situations when you need your battery to last. Of course, you don't have much choice if your device is one of the 7100 models that only have a backlit screen.
Keep your device in the holster: When your device detects that it is in its holster (through clever use of a magnet), it immediately goes into a power save mode. The backlight timeout is ignored, the screen is turned off, and it operates on minimal power while in the holster.

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The browser defaults are certainly not optimal. By changing the settings on your handheld, browsing can be much quicker.

The relatively recent addition of the BlackBerry Browser to the device makes it easy to browse web sites wherever you happen to be. Some might argue the built-in browser is probably the most underused program on the device.

By default, the browser will download all images, JavaScript, and stylesheets for each web site you visit. Although some sites built with XHTML look quite nice on a handheld, there are many sites that haven't gotten on the standards-compliant bandwagon. Many of these sites look plain silly on a handheld or are even downright unusable.

You can customize the settings on your BlackBerry Browser to provide a quicker, smoother ride no matter what virtual terrain comes your way.

Many of the images in the web sites you visit aren't optimized for handheld viewing. For each image on a web page, your device will have to initiate another HTTP request to retrieve it. On pages with just a few images, this is a serious time consumer.

When you visit a web page with images, the text of the page is rendered first and then the images are retrieved and rendered in your browser. When your browser initiates the request for a new image, it has no way of knowing the size it should allocate on the screen for that image, so it ends up allocating a very small amount of screen real estate for it.

When the image is downloaded to your device, the browser renders it and displays it on your screen. This can wreak some serious havoc when you're viewing a web site. Images take much longer to load than the text on the page; therefore, it's quite possible you've already read a good portion of the text on the page and then—bam! The image is loaded and the paragraph you were right in the middle of "disappears," because the browser has allocated the proper amount of space for the image, displacing the text. How frustrating! You now have to scroll down and find where you were reading when you were so rudely interrupted. This often happens more than once on a page that has multiple images!

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Use these settings so you'll always have enough memory for the latest third-party application you want to install.

As you receive more email, install more applications, and save more pictures and ringtones to your BlackBerry, you'll continue to consume more and more RAM on your device. Some of the devices RIM released in the early days had just 2 MB of storage or even less. Those of us who had one remember having to hand-crank them and trudge through the snow, uphill both ways to get them to work. Maybe I exaggerated a little, but they've come a long way.

Unfortunately, there is still only a finite amount of RAM available on devices and a seemingly unlimited supply of third-party software for the BlackBerry. This will require that you manage your storage space on your device.

Not only will you need to keep a comfortable amount of disk space available to install additional software, but there are important performance reasons to do so as well. The BlackBerry operating system uses the lightning-fast SRAM for normal memory operations. When that memory runs out, it uses the much slower flash memory for swap space. This is analogous to your PC, which will use a swap file on your computer's hard disk when it runs out of hardware memory. Just like your PC, your BlackBerry will slow down considerably if the amount of available swap space is too small.

To see how much free space you have available, go to Options → Status. This shows you the total amount of storage space you have in your device and the amount of free space, as seen in Figure 1-29.

Figure 1-29: The amount of total space and free space available

RIM recommends having at minimum of between 400 and 500 KB (400,000 to 500,000 bytes) of free space available for the operating system to swap memory efficiently. Any less than that and you'll stare at an hourglass for an excessive amount of time for whatever function you perform.

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Kick butt and take @names.

The David Allen Company has a fantastic productivity system called Getting Things Done, also known as GTD (http://www.davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php).

I will say this: Getting Things Done is a remarkable way to restore some balance and control over your life, and not just in the office. It works great for all occasions, and has managed to bring my stress levels from catastrophic highs to a much more reasonable pitch. It is easily the best system that I know of for chaos reduction.

Everyone implements GTD a little differently. I don't think I've ever met a purist in this dark art, with the full set of tickler files, folders, and all the other paraphernalia. It is a system that can be tooled up to work pretty well with the BlackBerry, however, and it doesn't even have to be painful.

This is a system that I cannot resist fiddling with a little bit, and most GTD nerds with an engineering and tinkering background do the same thing. These days I'm using a BlackBerry 7290 on T-Mobile, BES and BIS, and Microsoft Entourage. I am also using Microsoft Outlook 2003.

In both Outlook and Entourage, I have created categories for various contexts that I use in GTD. This includes but is not limited to:

@home: Things to do when I'm at home or in the home office.
@office: Things to do when I'm at the work office. The one with the bad lighting and a parking shortage.
@calls: Things to do when I'm able to make phone calls but nothing else, or just calls I need to make.
@anywhere: Things I can do anywhere, any time. Example: Think about ideas for

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With a little work, you can create your own polyphonic ringtones for your 7100 series device.

Who would have thought that ringtones would have become the industry that it is today? Ringtones are a $270 million industry, and that number is expected to balloon to $724 million by 2009 according to Jupitermedia. Everywhere you go you hear another mobile phone user's silly ringtone.

Audio has had mostly primitive support on the BlackBerry—that is, until the introduction of the 7100 series that is targeted toward the consumer as opposed to the business user. The 7100 series devices have support for polyphonic ringtones, and the 7290 device has support for monophonic ringtones. This hack will show you how to get your own custom polyphonic ringtone on your 7100.

There are five steps you'll need to take to get an audio clip in the right format and onto your device.

Get your audio into WAV format, either by recording your own sound using your computer and a microphone, ripping a track from a CD, or converting an MP3 file to WAV format.
Use a tool such as Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/) to crop your audio clip to a reasonable time for a ringtone, probably about 10 seconds.
Convert your audio clip to the Oki ADPCM audio format.
Put the converted audio clip on a web server that contains the appropriate file type for ADP files.
Use your BlackBerry Browser to access the URL of the file you placed on the web server.

If this sounds like too much work for you (not everyone has access to a properly configured web server), there is a service that you can pay for that will convert your audio clips and host them on a web server for you to download to your device. The Vodaberry service (http://www.blackberrytunes.com) costs just $18 a year for an unlimited number of MP3 conversions.

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Save images to your device and choose ones to display in prominent positions.

Beginning with BlackBerry 4.0, the handheld software ships with an application called Pictures. This program comes with a few stock photos to get you started. You can also add your own images to your device, although it is not at all obvious at first what steps you need to take to get them there. Use this hack to add your own pictures to your device and add them to your background.

To use the Pictures program, from your Home screen, click on the Pictures icon to bring up the program, as shown in Figure 1-39. The application displays a list of the images that you have on your device. From this screen, you can choose a picture and do several things with it via the menu.

Figure 1-39: The Pictures application

Use the trackwheel to bring up the menu. Here are the options available on the menu and their functions:

Set As Home Screen Image: Use this option to have the current picture display as a background on your Home screen.
Reset Home Screen Image: Reverts your Home screen background image to the factory default.
Set As Standby Screen: Display the selected picture as the image on your standby screen. This is the screen that displays your owner information when your device is locked. The 7100 series devices don't have this option.
Reset Standby Screen: Reverts the standby image back to the factory defaults. The 7100 series devices don't have this option.

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If you have a BlackBerry that supports Bluetooth, use your computer as a poor-man's headset.

Up until fairly recently, RIM didn't make a BlackBerry device that supported Bluetooth, even as it is becoming a standard feature of other smart phones. That all changed when RIM released the 7290. The BlackBerry 7290 as well as the 7100 series devices have built-in Bluetooth, and you can expect future devices to include support for the protocol as well.

Given all the data synchronization capabilities of the BlackBerry, you'd expect to be able to do lots of things with the Bluetooth adapter on the devices—but as of now, the capabilities are rather limited. You can't tether a laptop to share its data connection using Bluetooth—you have to cradle the device for that [Hack #9] . However, you can use a Bluetooth headset so you don't have to deal with the cord on your earpiece—or worse, hold that oddly shaped 7290 to your ear to talk on the phone. The fancy Bluetooth headsets are plentiful but still somewhat costly. If you've purchased a computer recently, there's a decent chance it already has Bluetooth built in. If not, you can purchase a Bluetooth adapter for a reasonable price that allows you to do a whole host of things with computer peripherals, including acting as a headset for your BlackBerry!

Some older Bluetooth adapters made for PCs have limited Bluetooth support. Be sure that the adapter you are buying supports the Bluetooth Headset Profile. Most, if not all, Bluetooth 1.1–compliant adapters should do the trick.

Wait, you say, isn't the goal to be more mobile—why would I want to use my computer as a speakerphone? And here comes the standard hacker's response: "Because you can!"

You'll need a Bluetooth adapter with the popular WIDCOMM chipset and software. Other chipsets may or may not work. I bought a Kensington Bluetooth USB Adapter from my local electronics store that came with the WIDCOMM software. You'll need to install the software on your Windows XP computer before inserting the USB adapter.

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Bars are for wimps! Be different and get in touch with your inner geek by displaying your wireless signal strength in decibels.

How many bars do you have? What does the number of bars actually mean? There are entire marketing campaigns by the wireless carriers about the bars that indicate the signal strength. But how does your device determine how many bars to throw up on your display? Surely there is some type of hard measurement that the device is doing to rank your wireless connection.

It turns out there is a hard number that represents the strength of your wireless signal—and there is a BlackBerry keyboard shortcut to change the bars to display the actual number. From your Home screen, type Alt-N,M,L,L.

If you are using a 7100 series device or another Sure Type predictive typing–enabled device, you'll need to type the following sequence: Alt-B,B,M,L,L.

After typing the sequence, you should see your signal strength meter change from bars (see Figure 1-47) to a number (see Figure 1-48). You can type the sequence again to go back to the bars for your signal strength.

Figure 1-47: The signal strength meter using bars

Figure 1-48: The signal strength meter using numbers

You'll notice that this number goes higher when you coverage is poorer, and vice versa. This number is actually a reflection of what appears in the Status section of your Options program, as shown in Figure 1-49, without the dash indicating negative.

What exactly does that number mean anyway? Your signal strength is measured in units of dBm, which means decibels relative to 1 milliwatt. The GSM/GPRS radio inside your BlackBerry has a range of between–40 dBm at the highest and–120 dBm at the lowest (when you display the signal strength as a number, the BlackBerry doesn't show the minus sign). Your device will display a certain number of bars given the current dBm value. Table 1-7 shows the ranges of values that correspond to the number of bars that are displayed.

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After becoming accustomed to cellular phone use, trying to use your BlackBerry as a phone may frustrate you at first. Here are some phone tips you'll love!

When you make the upgrade from a cell phone to a BlackBerry, you may find it difficult to get used to making calls without some of the features your phone had. If you frequently make calls on your BlackBerry, take note of some settings that can ease the process of making those calls.

To place a call, open the Phone application. The Phone screen appears. In the empty field at the top, you can type a phone number and then click to enter to make a call. BlackBerry 7100 device users have the luxury of dialing right from the Home screen without first going into the Phone program.

Even if you aren't lucky enough to have a 7100 series device, you can enable the same convenience of dialing from the Home screen. It saves a couple of clicks if you use the phone often!

Here's how to do it:

Open the Phone program. The Phone screen appears.
Click the trackwheel and select Options
Select General Options. The General Options screen appears as shown in Figure 1-50.
Select Dial From Home Screen. Click the trackwheel and set the option to Yes.

When Dial From Home Screen is set to Yes, you cannot use shortcuts [Hack #3] for the applications on the Home screen.
Click the trackwheel and select Save.

Figure 1-50: Dial From Home Screen Option

Have you started to dial a number that consists of letters on your BlackBerry? It won't be long before you realize that you have no idea what numbers those letters translate into on a traditional dial pad so that you can place the call on your BlackBerry. Your handheld goes into number-lock mode on the Phone screen, and letters do not appear when they are entered in this mode. Don't worry, there's still an easy way to accomplish this!

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Save notes from your phone calls and recall that information when you need it.

While you are on an active call with your BlackBerry, press in the trackwheel and choose "Notes" from the menu. You will be greeted with a nice clean slate of text input, ready to accept your notes, as shown in Figure 1-56.

Figure 1-56: Adding call notes to the current call

This will, of course, be most convenient when you're using a headset or speakerphone. The way I use this feature is that I jot down notes relevant to that call such as confirmation numbers or meeting notes, and save them. I can return to the Messages application, find the call in the list of calls I've placed, and find my notes there. From here, you can also copy text and put it into its final destination, whether an email, task, or appointment.

If you don't remember to take notes during your call, don't fret: you can add notes to a previous call by opening the call in the Messages list and selecting "Add Notes" from the menu. If you have decided to not show calls in your Messages list, you can magically make them appear by pressing Alt-P [Hack #24] . You can then surf your messages list and get these useful little pieces of metadata and put them to use. If you discussed a budget, an invoice, or something else that you may need to reference later, make a note of it in the call and you can find this information later. If you need to remember what you talked about last time you spoke to Client X, the notes will be right there in the call detail!

You can also highlight a phone call that has notes, click the trackwheel, and select Forward (see Figure 1-57) to forward it (notes and all) to an email address.

Figure 1-57: Forwarding your call notes

This lets you quickly shove the notes from that important conference call to your helpless subordinates.

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Find the latest version of your device's system software and install it.

Changes and new features are added to the system software by RIM at a pretty decent clip. RIM is constantly looking to fix bugs in the handheld code no matter how infrequently they crop up. Once RIM produces a new version of the handheld code, it does take a while to filter down to new handhelds, so you may find that your handheld software on your device is already a revision or two behind even shortly after you buy it.

The good news is that you can find and install the latest handheld code free of charge. Because the wireless carriers' infrastructures vary, there are versions of the handheld software per carrier. So if you use a device from Cingular, you need to monitor the Cingular download area of BlackBerry's web site for code for your device.

To ensure that you don't install software from the wrong carrier, RIM doesn't provide links to the various handheld software download areas from its site. You have to visit your carrier's site to find the link to the downloads. The wireless carrier's web sites are definitely a moving target, so to provide links here would be futile. Most of the carriers provide fairly prominent placement for the links to download the latest firmware. This can usually be found in the BlackBerry section. If you have any trouble finding the page, dial 611 (or your carrier's tech support number) from your BlackBerry and ask.

How do you know you need an upgrade? On the handheld code download page, it will give two version numbers that you can compare to your device to see if you are behind. Look for the Software Platform version number and the Applications version number on the download page for your handheld (see Figure 1-58).

On your device, go to the Options program to find the versions of the code on your handheld. To view the software platform, click on About to view the version number, as shown in Figure 1-59. The platform version on the About screen is the version number you need to compare with what's available on the web site. If the version on your handheld is less than the version on the web site, your handheld is a candidate for an upgrade.

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For those long emails, use this fold up Bluetooth keyboard to crank 'em out quicker than the best thumb typist.

While there are all types of tricks included in the BlackBerry operating system to make you type quickly with your thumbs, nothing can compare to the speed of a full size keyboard. For Bluetooth enabled BlackBerry devices, you can use a full size keyboard that makes composing those long, well thought out emails a breeze. Not only does the keyboard allow for quick typing on your BlackBerry, but you can also set up hotkey combinations that spawn certain applications.

The keyboard is made by a company called Freedom Input and costs $99. It is available for purchase at the following URL: http://www.eaccess-estore.com/store/catalog.asp?item=199. The keyboard is compact and sleek. It's not a whole lot larger than your device when it's folded up. When it is unfolded, your device sits on a small stand that slides out of the top right side of the keyboard as shown in Figure 1-62.

You'll need to do a couple of things to get your keyboard working. First, you'll need to enable the Bluetooth adapter on your device. Second, the keyboard requires that some software be installed on your device. Along with the keyboard comes a CD with a unique key printed on the back of the sleeve. You'll need to enter this key on the Freedom Input web site (http://www.blackberrykeyboard.com/index.htm) to register your keyboard and download the software for your BlackBerry. You'll need to use Desktop Manager and Application Loader to install the keyboard software on your device.

Once the software is installed, you'll also need to pair with your keyboard using the Bluetooth section of your Options program. This is similar to the action taken when using your computer as a Bluetooth headset [Hack #16] . Put 2 AAA batteries in the keyboard and turn it on using the switch on the bottom-left side near the Ctrl key. In your Bluetooth settings on your BlackBerry, select "Add Device" from the trackwheel menu. As your Bluetooth adapter searches for devices within range, your keyboard should be detected and identified by the string "KEYBOARD." Select your keyboard from the list and use "0000" for the passkey. At this point, you should be able to use the keyboard to type on your BlackBerry.

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Rather than building an organizer and then retrofitting email support onto it, Research In Motion designed the BlackBerry for email from the beginning and only then added support for other features. Highly secure, pushbased email is what has made the BlackBerry so popular in the business world. Every effort was made to allow users to efficiently process the mountain of email messages they receive daily. Email is great, but it can quickly become a burden—just go on vacation for a week without your BlackBerry and see what awaits you upon your return! There are a number of hidden features of the BlackBerry you can use to your advantage. You can clear a bunch of messages at once [Hack #22] , filter your messages [Hack #24] , and make your email doubly secure [Hack #28] .

The hacks in this chapter will let you get through your mail quickly when you're on the go, so you won't have a pile of unread mail when you get back to the office—you'll have already read it on your BlackBerry.

Process hundreds of messages in one fell swoop.

If you forward all your messages to your BlackBerry, there has probably been a time where you'd like to process many of the messages in your inbox at once instead of clicking through each. Sometimes an errant automated task can send you hundreds of messages that you don't need to read. At other times, you may have already read several messages using your email program on your PC, so you'd like to mark every previous message on your BlackBerry as read.

Luckily, BlackBerry offers a feature to do just this.

In your Messages application, all your messages are sorted by the date they were received by your device. For each day, there will be a date heading that serves as a divider that shows you which messages were received on which day.

Use the trackwheel to select a particular date and click the trackwheel to bring up a menu. By default, the Compose Mail option will be selected. Above that selection are two options: Mark Prior Opened and Delete Prior (see Figure 2-1). These options do exactly as you'd expect—they mark all previous messages as deleted or read.

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Rather than building an organizer and then retrofitting email support onto it, Research In Motion designed the BlackBerry for email from the beginning and only then added support for other features. Highly secure, pushbased email is what has made the BlackBerry so popular in the business world. Every effort was made to allow users to efficiently process the mountain of email messages they receive daily. Email is great, but it can quickly become a burden—just go on vacation for a week without your BlackBerry and see what awaits you upon your return! There are a number of hidden features of the BlackBerry you can use to your advantage. You can clear a bunch of messages at once [Hack #22] , filter your messages [Hack #24] , and make your email doubly secure [Hack #28] .

The hacks in this chapter will let you get through your mail quickly when you're on the go, so you won't have a pile of unread mail when you get back to the office—you'll have already read it on your BlackBerry.

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Process hundreds of messages in one fell swoop.

If you forward all your messages to your BlackBerry, there has probably been a time where you'd like to process many of the messages in your inbox at once instead of clicking through each. Sometimes an errant automated task can send you hundreds of messages that you don't need to read. At other times, you may have already read several messages using your email program on your PC, so you'd like to mark every previous message on your BlackBerry as read.

Luckily, BlackBerry offers a feature to do just this.

In your Messages application, all your messages are sorted by the date they were received by your device. For each day, there will be a date heading that serves as a divider that shows you which messages were received on which day.

Use the trackwheel to select a particular date and click the trackwheel to bring up a menu. By default, the Compose Mail option will be selected. Above that selection are two options: Mark Prior Opened and Delete Prior (see Figure 2-1). These options do exactly as you'd expect—they mark all previous messages as deleted or read.

Figure 2-1: The Bulk Message functions on the menu

If you have a lot of messages on your device to mark opened, it could take some time to go through and mark each message read even if there are only a few unread messages. Your device still has to check each message on your device to see if it is read or not. To solve this, you can select multiple adjacent messages by holding down the Shift key and using the trackwheel to highlight the unread messages. This will perform the operation only on the messages you selected rather than the entire list, so it will be much faster.

You can use this hack to process the results of a search as well. Let's say an automated job that sends you email just sent you 100 messages before you were able to stop it. Perhaps they are interspersed among other important messages that you need to read. If there is some commonality in the automated messages, such as the same subject or sender, you can use the search function to confine your results to only these messages.

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Use the Search function to create custom views of your mail messages. You can even assign a hotkey to execute your saved search without defining the search parameters each time.

With the mountains of email we receive each day, those messages pile up quickly. When you need to find a specific message that was sent to you a couple days ago, sifting through the message list can be a chore, especially when you've got such a small screen to work with.

If you are using the BlackBerry Web Client (BWC), you might lament how your messages don't pile up quickly! Instead, as soon as you get close to your miserly quota, you get a few messages about how your inbox is about to fill up, and then total silence. You may have luck calling your provider and asking for a larger quota on the BWC. Some users have had success with this, moving quotas to 20 MB or even 40 MB. You should, of course, check up o

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