AutoStandby – I use my Blackberry alot, as you can imagine. One of the first things I did was buy a larger battery on eBay which gives me about 30% more life. Still wasnt enough. After purchasing this app which is deffinitely worth the $6 USD, I saw a greater improvement than the larger battery. Although the app has had some glitches in my experience, this one I can’t live without.

BerryBuzz – I picked this one up last week as I have wanted the functionality this app offers since I got my Bold. With this app you can change the colour of the alert LED depending on what caused the alert. Now without even taking my BB out of standby I can tell if I have a new email (and from which account), a SMS, Calendar entry etc. Here are some screens, all settings are done via standard options screen.

BBFileScout – This is BY FAR the best file manager program out on the Blackberry. I have tried half a dozen of them and none met my expectations until just the other week I found this gold mine. This is as close to Windows Explorer or Finder as you can get. When you click on a file, FileScout is smart enough to recognize the file type and open it with the appropriate application. Clicking a .doc file will open it in Docs to Go. What a concept! I cant believe other so called file managers havent included this feature. FileScout also includes zip support, text file viewing and more. This is absolutely essential. The author hopes to keep this app free and asks that you make a small donation on his website.

Tetris – This is a free Tetris clone made by a member of the Crackberry community, Papped. It has music from the original game and is great for when you have a few minutes to kill. Works like tetris! Donations are accepted and encouraged on his homepage.

QSMS – This little app is great, it creates a hotkey fot the letter Q to bring up the ‘Compose SMS’ screen. Invaluble.

QuickPull – The application simulates a battery pull on your device without you actually having to remove the battery. If you are having software or hardware/gps issues you can run this to reset the device. This simulates a battery pull which is different then a reboot – Alt + Right Shift + Del.

Capture It – This is a handy program if you ever want to take screenshots of your Blackberry. Many of the default applications have a ‘Capture It’ menu option to take a screenshot which is put in your media folder. For other apps, you can set one of your side keys to ‘Capture It’ which will launch the program whos only purpose is to take a screen capture.

I reference Lifehacker and the post Top 10 Free Video Converters. You can find a list of software there. I myself prefer Clone2Go Free version which is demonstrated in the screencast. Hope this helps!

I first heard about REXwireless while browsing the Crackberry forums. A few users were talking about productivity applications and highly recommended the applications from REXwireless. After checking out their website and finding there was a fully functional free trial, I thought it couldnt hurt to try the software myself and see if I was missing anything. I am glad I did. I will explain each of the products and how they are more useful than the stock RIM apps.

Todo Matrix: This is an advanced to do list application, greatly expanding on the capabilities of what the regular RIM Todo application does. Todo Matrix allows and requires organizing your todo items into categories and sub categories (called drawers). You can easily view items from each category or subcategory, view tasks by due date, overdue, priority etc.

Todo Matrix greatly extends the available status’ available in the stock application. You can place tasks on hold as well as a number of other useful selections and set up to 3 alerts for each task. What I enjoy best about Todo Matrix is that it handles large numbers of tasks efficiently. I no longer just put my high priority tasks in the Todo app and check it every couple days. I put everything I need to get done including reminders about little things that I typically forget about (dishes, recycling, etc). I then check my tasks much more frequently throughout the day and get more done.

Another very nice feature that both Idea and Todo Matrix support is data injection. This feature adds a menu item to your web browser, email, calendar, sms messages etc and allows you to send your selected data, page url, etc automatically to Idea or Todo Matrix without the copy/paste and task switching. This has become a very useful feature as you can easily create a note or todo task containing the information contained in an email or webpage.

Todo Matrix has many advanced features, my favourite being a great search mechanism and the ability to sync and edit tasks on the web via REX Desktop. It also includes task handling methodologies from Stephen Covey and David Allen’s ‘Getting Things Done’. You can view the list of features here as well as find a trial on their website.

Idea Matrix: This app is very similar to Todo Matrix except it is used for advanced note taking. This has replaced the standard Memopad app for me. It allows categories in the same way as Todo Matrix.

Idea Matrix supports an advanced search function that shows seach matches on the fly as you enter in search phrases. This is an amazing feature that really helps when you start managing a large number of notes. I use a whole section dedicated to keeping a list of peoples names that I am likely to forget. It is awesome that I am able to search these!

Notes can also have alerts associated with them and can be password protected which I found useful for my banking information, which I always like to have in my PDA but am always cautious with. Idea Matrix can also be syncronized to the web and edited with REX Desktop.

Alert Matrix: This becomes essential as the number of incoming emails/sms messages increases to the point where your Blackberry is buzzing or flashing red every 5 minutes. You know those days where you are just tired and turn your Blackberry onto Quiet Profile and turn it upside down? Yeah well if you set up Alert Matrix then you can save yourself from some of those times.

With Alert Matrix you can make profiles for your contacts so that emails/messages from certain people or that satisfy your filters can get a special ring, vibrate or led alert. For those times like where I mentioned above you can also enable filters for the particularly annoying people that send you massive ammounts of email. Alert Matrix will intercept the email and disable the alert before your berry notifies you. FABULOUS. It is also possible to have high priority alerts that can cause your berry to beep/ring whatever even when you have it set to Quiet Profile.

REX Connect: This is a small but useful app. I dont know of any other Blackberry developers other than REX Wireless that offer so many high quality apps. REX Connect gives you menu options to send the contents from Emails, memos, calendar entries, clipboard, address book entries and all the other REX Wireless apps to other applications. The following diagram illustrates:

For example, in my calendar I can select a Meeting entry, press menu and select REX Connect. This opens a small dialog which I can select any of the applications in the above picture. If I choose SMS my contacts pop up and I choose a friend to send a SMS with the calendar entry. REX Connect populates the text message area with the information from the calendar entry, allows me to edit it and send it.

This is another app that you really need to use before you can imagine how useful it might become. Thankfully REX Wireless offers full trials on all their software. They have a detailed website including tons of information about each application including screencasts, white papers on task management and more. From the dealings that I have had with them thus far, their support staff are top notch also.

Conclusion: I have spent alot of time introducing these apps from REXwireless but you really need to give them a try for yourself. They may not seem as intuitive as many other Blackberry apps are at first but once you memorize the shortcuts you will be thankful for the advanced functionality these programs offer.

If you sign up for the trial versions of Idea and/or Todo Matrix be sure you try out the REX Desktop which is a web interface to your data. Nice to be able to quickly copy/paste and enter large pieces of data especially for Idea Matrix.

Bundle and education discounts are available for all of the above mentioned software. I strongly recommend all of these applications if you are looking for more functionality and increased productivity on your Blackberry. Check out the REX Wireless software over at their website for more details.

1. Reboot Time – It takes more time to reboot the Bold then it does to reboot my desktop and then my laptop one after the other. For a full five minutes the device is useless. I wish I understood why it takes so long.
    
2. Slow Processor – The Bolds 624 mhz processor is the fastest among BlackBerrys. Why then is the device so bloody slow? I see the animated clock icon all the time. Granted, I use the device a little harder than most, and even though I hate to seem like the guy who can’t be impressed by anything, let’s be honest: the performance of  some of the apps is laughable. For example, my Keepass database is roughly 100kb, regular AES encryption. Using KeepassBB to open the DB on the Berry takes roughly 30-40 seconds. My Windows Mobile that is currently over 3 years old can do the same thing in less than half the time. Again, I would love to understand–maybe its the programs algorithm–not sure.
    
3. Battery Hog – This thing goes through batteries like I wish I could go through video cards. It needs to be charged daily, even after purchasing AutoStandBy and a 25% larger 1700 mah battery.
    
4. No .NET Compact Edition - This is too much to hope for, but I wish the Blackberry supported .NET CE. I know this would be too good to be true, but would attract new developers to the platform.
    
5. Developer Tools – I am not the best judge, but from what I have seen and experienced so far, the programming for Blackberry is far from a perfect experience. The Eclipse plugin is just becoming functional, the JDE is a blast to the past and the developer site is not as good as it could be. Supporting Java ME apps is good and it appears like RIM is extending their APIs with the newer OS’s
    
6. Some programs launch at startup, even if you dont want them too – A couple apps that I have to have on my Blackberry launch themselves when the device boots for no apparent reason other then to annoy me. There is no way to disable this in the app, but there is also no security or startup setting on the OS that will let me prevent these lame apps from starting.
    
7. No built in Multi-Alarms – Seriously, what is going on with this one? I can only have one alarm at a time with the software the RIM ships. 
    
8. Cant change default browser – I wouldn’t want to change it to Opera just yet as it lacks essential features for me (send page address via email) but I shouldn’t be locked into using one browser when I click links from other applications.
    
9. BlackBerry Desktop Software Sucks – Does the Blackberry desktop manager work properly for anyone? I dont think so. I know it attempts to upgrade your foreign language packs every time you turn it on, even if you dont use those languages. Backups are broken with custom ring tones/alarms. Roxio is garbage.
    
10. Creaky Battery Door – The Bold has this fancy pleather backing on the battery door. Too bad the door does not fit onto the device 100% so the door wobbles a bit with soime pressure. This also drives me nuts. I need to do a electrical tape modification just so the back door fits.
     
11. No changelog between Operating System revisions – This is one of the biggest complaints I have. There seems to be a new Beta OS for new RIM devices every couple weeks. I think it is great that they ship code so often. The problem I have with it is they dont include changelogs between builds. Users post what they think is different between releases including bugs, new issues, or even how they feel that the browser is faster or their 3G is speedier even though it is likely RIM did not touch code relating to either. Not that big a deal, it will only be a few more months until all support is put into the new and upcoming devices.

So there are all my complaints. Other than the above mentioned things this is a fantastic device. For those who might read that and think the Bold may not be any good, it took me a good long time to think up all those complaints after a month and a half of use. I could think of a list that long about an iPhone and I’ve only used one of those for a couple of hours.

Stay tuned, I will post the next series of my essential apps soon.