Blackberry Pearl users are seldom known to be lazy or “slackers.  Business people who are keeping everything organized in the ultimate handheld device.  Blackberry pearl users are instantly able to pull up that latest corporate memo, just about anyones contact information, all of their appointments for the next 7 months and now they can call up a custom designed streaming radio station on their phones.

With Pandora failing to provide Blackberry applications, many have turned to Slacker.com which just might be even better.  Pandora is another company pandering to the hype of the iPhone rather than looking the considerably larger market share owned by Research In Motion. I still don’t understand why it’s so difficult for these software companies to see the mistake they’re making by ignoring the Blackberry.

Slacker.com has a very well made application you can load onto your Blackberry Pearl and stream your favorite music.  This is done through your mobile provider, so make sure you’ve signed up for an unlimited data plan.  The Slacker.com application is free download and use, but you will have to listen to some commercials infrequently after the initial 7 day trial period.  Don’t worry, you won’t be cut off or billed after the 7 days, Slacker will just drop in a quick commercial once in a while (not even close to the amount you’ll get from your local radio stations).  It’s a small price to pay for an amazing application.

Slacker.com does an excellent job of building a custom station that meets your specific taste.  If you hear a song or artist you don’t like you can “ban” it from Slacker and it will never play again. The more you use Slacker, the smarter it gets at predicting what you’re going to like.  Slacker also employs some music experts to build some general genres of music.  If you love reggea, classic rock, jazz, and even comedy, it’s all already pre-programed on Slacker.  Of course, you can still ban a song or artist you may not like and never hear it again.

Slacker also includes all of the album artwork as well as some very in depth artist bios in the event you’re so inspired you want to know more.  You can also choose to read a review of the album while the music continues to play.

Music caching may be the greatest advantage offered by Slacker.  Imagine yourself sitting at your gate in the airport.  You’re enjoying your favorite music through your unlimited data plan as it streams down into your Slacker application.  Since you’re about to jump onto a plane and will have to turn off your phones signal, you’ll lose your connection while in the air.  Slacker to the rescue.  Simply “cache” the station your listening to and Slacker will store it on your MicroSD sim card.  Once you’re on the plane you’ll be able to continue listening even though you have absolutely no connection available.

If you subscribe to the Slacker premium edition ($3.99 per month billed annually at $47.88) you can also cache individual songs on our MicroSD card.  Imagine hearing a song you absolutely love and click click it’s now saved onto your phone.  Slacker will evaluate your available memory and let you know how much room you have left in terms of numbers of songs or stations.  You can then either continue saving that song or cancelling it.

The premium service also gives you some other benefits which may be worth the very small fee.  Unlimited music skipping means you can continuously scroll forward through the songs until you find just the right one.  You can also make an unlimited number of song requests which allows you to create a specific playlist of your favorite songs.  It’s about as close as you’ll come to having an unlimited number of MP3’s on your Blackberry. Of course, you don’t need to go the paid route and you’ll still find plenty of enjoyment using Slacker.com

With all of this great music on your Blackberry, you may want to consider picking up the Bluetooth Stereo Music Gateway to pipe your tunes into your home audio system.  Plug in an FM transmitter and you can have your customer slacker station through your car stereo on your daily commute.  Of course, this means you may want to also invest in a mobile battery charger to use on long trips.

You can download Slacker right now by pointing your mobile browser directly at www.slacker.com.  If you’re not near a computer, don’t worry, you can register on your phone and be up and running in no time.  Of course, you can log into your Slacker account via your high speed home connection and build all of your custom stations.  That way they’ll be waiting for you the next time you fire up Slacker.

Wow! I love this Blackberry application! I had been waiting to get on Facebook and this is what put me over the edge. It will revolutionize the way the use your Blackberry Pearl (is that too strong of a statement?).

Here’s what it will let you do:

• Update your status. This is something on Facebook that says “Patch is blah blah blah.” It lets your friends know what’s going on with you. Kind of cool. You can now update this from your Blackberry Facebook application. So if you go from lunch to the beach, you can post it in the parking lot. Not sure if your friends need to keep that close of a watch on you, but they can. This same section will let you see what your “friends” are doing via their status.
• Upload and Tag Photos. This is the coolest part of this application. Take a picture with your Blackberry Pearl and a new option besides “save” or “MMS Message” is now available. You can choose to post that picture on your Facebook page. You can even tag your Facebook friends in your picture and it will link to them on Facebook. If you already have pictures on your Blackberry, you can tag and upload those as well.
• View your friends list. Scroll through your entire list of friends. Find someone you want to interact with and you can pop up a menu to choose been “writing on their wall”, “sending them a message”, “viewing their profile”, and “poking” them. I”m still not really sure what poking does, but you can do it.
• Invite a friend. Still have some friend who aren’t on Facebook? Send them an invitation to join your crazy new addiction. I think that’s pretty much all that one is for.
• Poke someone. Again, I don’t really know what this does other than telling people that you poked someone. If you know, please let us in on the secret.
• Write on their wall. You can write on your friends wall directly from your Blackberry. This is kind a public area where you can interact with your friends.
• Send them a message. Another way to interact with your friends without letting everyone else in on the conversation. It’s like email within Facebook.

All in all, this is a very cool application. If you’re using Facebook more often than once a week, you really need to get this application. The easiest way to do so is to point your Blackberry browser to www.facebook.com. It will notice you’re on a Blackberry and suggest the download. Don’t even think twice about it. Get it and start having fun.

I was going to show my wife how to transfer music from our PC to her new pink Blackberry Pearl, but she got a little impatient. I said “whatever you do, don’t mess with that ridiculous Roxio Media Manager. Instead I told her to check out the article I wrote about getting media onto a Blackberry Pearl.

Unfortunately, my wife didn’t follow direction or she got confused or something cause she ended up doing something a little different. This is a great discovery a lot of people may not know about (I didn’t).

Transfer Directly From iTunes to Your Blackberry Pearl

In the instruction I gave on getting around the Roxio Media Manager, I suggested opening up Windows Explorer and dragging files from the iTunes directory into the Blackberry Pearl “music” folder. Instead of doing this, my wife opened up TWO windows. One of them was Windows Explorer and the other was iTunes! She just started dragging files directly from her iTunes playlists straight onto her Blackberry Pearl.

I never realized you could do this. It’s so simple and it will even keep all of your Artist, Album and Genre information in tact. Of course, I tried to grab a playlist and move that over, but no luck. You’ll still have to create those on your Blackberry Pearl once you’ve uploaded your music, but it’s very simple. Maybe I’ll write a simple set of instructions for that in the future.

As for now, enjoy the drag and drop transfers from iTunes to your Blackberry Pearl. Oh, and now my wife gets to claim bragging rights for teaching her techno-geek husband how to do something on his Blackberry Pearl. Humbling to say the least, since she’s not really that technologically inclined.

* Added Bonus: Ok, now I’m starting to mess around with this and I really like what I’m seeing. I’m now able to use the awesome search and sort functions within iTunes to narrow down my songs to exactly what I want and then select them ALL and drag over to my Blackberry Pearl.

* Added Added Bonus: I think I’m going to create a “Blackberry Pearl” playlist in iTunes and then when I hear a song I want on my Blackberry, I can just drag it into that playlist. The next time I sync up my phone, I can just call up the “Blackberry Pearl” playlist and drag it’s content over to the Blackberry (remember, you have to drag the content of the playlist, not the playlist itself) and it will ask me if I want to replace the songs. Simply click “No to All” (I haven’t verified this is an option) and you’ll only move over the songs you didn’t have (kind of like a one-way sync).

I stumbled upon something very cool specifically for those of us who are constantly looking down moving our little thumb around on our Blackberry Pearl.

Social networks are popping up everywhere these days with the big dogs still out there.  MySpace, Facebook, Digg, Twitter and the rest.  But, there’s a new trend toward niche social networks.  These are social networks where everyone starts with one thing in common.  It could be a genre of music, a hobby, or in the case of Blackberry Ave, an addiction…

Blackberry Ave is like most other social networking sites.  It’s all about being social and networking (duh).  But, this is different.  This site is designed to be viewed on your Blackberry browser.  Of course it works great on your Mac or PC, but it’s designed to be a WAP site. There is a rumor, if you try to view it from an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll get a special message.  I don’t have one so I’ll have to check at the Mac store to see what it says.

The other thing you’ll notice about Blackberry Ave is the listing of PINs.  Before I had a Blackberry, I saw people post PINs on a website and wondered if they were opening up their bank accounts to theft.

If you’re one of the underprivileged without a Blackberry, a PIN is what you use to message exclusively between Blackberry users.  It’s like your AIM or MSN screen name but it only works with the Blackberry Messanger.  Which, by the way, only works on a Blackberry… neener.

There’s also a very cool feature giving every user 10mb of free space on the site to upload your favorite ringtones, wallpaper, themes, or whatever.  Not sure if the owner is going to be able to keep that up.

As of this writing, Blackberry Ave is just getting off the ground after launching 2 months ago.  But, already there is a great group of VERY friendly people on the site. One in particular, is a Blackberry addict who goes by Bull.  He’s got to be one of the most active people on the site as well as one of the most helpful.  Not only does he have his own blog at BloggedBull.com, he’s also writing reviews at BerryReview.com.  Make sure you find him and add him to your friends list.

The “Tom” of Blackberry Ave is a guy named Luigi Raw.  He’s hanging out in Leeds in the UK and unlike Tom on MySpace, he doesn’t force you to be his friend.  So, make sure you take some time to add him to your list of other addicts.

I was forced to have my first experience with Roxio Media Manager today. It didn’t go well! Let me explain and offer the worlds greatest solution to managing the media on your Blackberry Pearl without using the Roxio Medio Manager.

It all started when my iPod was stolen from my car the other night along with my bluetooth headset. Nobody broke into my car because they didn’t have to break in. I was kind enough to leave it unlocked for them. I felt like an idiot. I live in a very safe neighborhood, but it was the first day of Spring Break and I think the neighborhood kids were bored.

I used my iPod for audio books more than anything else. My car was my rolling university as I listed and learned everywhere I went. That was over now. Fortunately I had everything on my iTunes in a secondary hard drive.

It was now time to try out the media capabilities of my Blackberry Pearl. I knew my Pearl was also an MP3 player, but I hadn’t run it through it’s paces. The first thing I did was install the Roxio Media Manager I recieved from Verizon Wireless. Over 180 gigs to download this gigantic program. Once I installed it, I was ready to put my beloved audio books onto my Blackberry Pearl. But wait… and wait… and wait…

Roxio Media Manager is VERY slow. I just upgraded to a very fast computer and everything runs perfect except Roxio Media Manager. It’s brought my machine to a crawl. No wait, not a crawl, a screeching halt! I couldn’t do anything with this software. I can’t imagine this ever went through any type of testing period. When I did manage to get a song from my iTunes library to Roxio Media Manager I couldn’t remove it. I would right click, click on “remove” and the next time I started Roxio Media Manager it was back.

Here’s the Solution:

Update: I wrote the below instruction before I discovered something very cool. Here’s how to move music directly from iTunes onto your Blackberry Pearl.

Uninstall Roxio Media Manager immediately. The only reason you need this is to access the internal memory on your Blackberry Pearl (I never store anything on there and if I do, I can manage it from within my Blackberry Pearl). If you have a memory card installed in your Pearl, you can use Windows Explorer to transfer music, videos, pictures, ringtones and voice notes. It’s as simple as dragging and dropping just like you do with any other drive or directory. No more dealing with Roxio Media Manager. I wish someone had told me this sooner.

What is Windows Explorer? It’s not Internet Explorer. Press and hold the Windows key (it’s between Ctrl and Alt in the lower left corner of your keyboard) and then press “E”. Get it, Windows (E)xplorer? Should be easy to remember.

Make sure you turn on Mass Storage

If you plug your Blackberry Pearl into your PC via the USB cable you should see it show up as a removable drive (just like a thumb or flash drive). If it’s not there, you probably haven’t turned on the “Mass Storage” on your Blackberry. Here’s how you do that:

1. From your home screen, press the Blackberry Button (just left of the “pearl”).
2. This should bring up all of the icons. Now click on Options icon (for me it’s a little wrench).
3. Scroll down to “Media Card” and select it.
4. “Mass Storage Mode Support” should be set to ON.
5. “Auto Enable Mass Storage Mode When Connected” should be on YES or PROMPT.
6. Save those setting and reconnect your Blackberry Pearl with your PC.

If you still don’t see a new “Removable Disk“, you may not have a memory card installed. You can check this by opening the little door on the left side just below the USB port on your Blackberry Pearl.

Once you have your Blackberry Pearl showing up as a removable drive, you can drag files in just like you would any other drive or folder. No need to convert your MP3’s for your Blackberry. Best of all, no more dealing with Roxio Media Manager and that’s a GREAT thing! Sorry Roxio…

Attention Research In Motion: The Blackberry Pearl is the best phone I’ve ever owned. You’re hurting your reputation by having your product associated with such a horrible piece of software like Roxio Media Manager. There must be a different solution if you plan on competing with the iPhone and iTunes. This is a battle you can win, but not with Roxio Media Manager.

Two of the most innovative companies have finally come together to create the application everyone has been screaming for. Finally a piece of Blackberry Pearl software made specifically for the Mac. PocketMac® for Blackberry is now available. What will it do for you? PocketMac for Blackberry will allow you to sync your Mac and Blackberry. Now your calendar, tasks, contacts and notes will all be on your Blackberry when you leave the house or office. It works with Blackberry Pearl or Curve and the following applications:

• Mail.app Email
• Entourage Email, Contacts, Calendar, Tasks and Notes
• Address Book Contacts
• iCal Calendar and Tasks
• Now Contact / Now Up-To-Date Contacts, Calendars & Tasks
• Meeting Maker Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks
• Lotus Notes Contacts, Calendar, and Tasks
• Safari Bookmarks (One-Way sync)

No more need for secondary applications like Missing Sync. Best of all, PocketMac is absolutely free. You can download your copy of it right here:

Download PocketMac for Blackberry

As I mentioned in another post, Google Maps is one of the most important applications you could install on your Blackberry Pearl.

Once you’ve installed it, you’ll want to know all the shortcuts that make it much easier to use. Here’s what you’ll need to know:

Press 1 Zooms out

Press 3 Zooms in

Press 2 Toggles between map and satellite view

Press # Show search results

Press 4 Show previous search location

Press 6 Show next search location

Press 5 Scroll up

Press 8 Scroll down

Press 7 Scroll left

Press 9 Scroll right

Press 0 Show “My Location”

Press * List saved favorites

You can also use the pearl button to scroll left, right, up and down.

If you press the pearl button when you’re looking at your search locations a new menu will come up showing you more information about that location. This also has a listing of phone numbers and the ability to dial the business directly.

If you don’t have Google Maps on your Blackberry Pearl yet, you need it.

If I had to recommend just one application to add to your Blackberry Pearl, it would have to be Google maps.

Real-time traffic — Find out exactly where the traffic is and estimate delays in over 30 major US cities.

Detailed directions — Whether you plan to walk or drive, your route is displayed on the map itself, together with step-by-step directions.

Search for local businesses — You can search for a specific business name or a general type of business. You can even type in an address.

Movable Map — It’s very easy to zoom in or out scroll side to side.

Satellite imagery — Get a bird’s eye view of what you’re looking at in the map.

Here’s a little video from Google to explain the latest feature called “My Location”:

Grab your Blackberry Pearl and browse over to www.google.com/gmm and start using Google Maps for your Blackberry.

Once you have Google Maps installed you’ll want to learn the keyboard shortcuts in Google maps specifically for the Blackberry.