Everyone knows I love the Blackberry - especially the Pearl, and it's Boomer-friendlier partner the Curve. Everything about them screams "Look! You can succeed in sales!" They are slim (unlike the Reuben-sized Treos) and bright screened (unlike classic cell phones) and you can type with either hand, one-thumbed, and you don't need a "stylus" or to poke the screen like Bobo the Chimpanzee (unlike the iPhone). And most of all, what really makes the Blackberry the ideal sales platform is that it's solid. Rarely do you have to "reset" your Blackberry (whereas I had to reset my Motorola Q so many times I finally reset it using the front-wheel of my car).

The very "solidness" of the Blackberry is what makes it ideal: your appointments, tasks, address book and email work accurately and quickly every minute of every day, mostly because they perform most of the functions of Outlook, but they aren't Outlook. Palm tried this with their own apps that "synchronized" with Outlook, but they took years to include their own synch-condiut. Users just got fed up trying to get three programs to work with each other - Outlook, their Palm calendar and the conduit. Blackberry set the standard in real-time synchronization without any additional software - and completely wirelessly - long before others figured out that their "cradles" meant that their devices were still babies. Even the web browser and RSS reader in the Blackberry is fast and easy to navigate - especially when you set it to emulate the Blackberry mode and turn off the clunky Microsoft javascript compatibility. Once again, Blackberry excels because it mostly "turns off" the Micro-craftiness of Microsoft tools, most of which only cause mobile devices to crash throughout the day.

Now, not everyone loves the Blackberry's "just the facts, ma'am" style, however. Even yours truly thought it might be nice to see graphical email - since so many critical messages I receive nowadays leverage images like bar-charts or trendlines of market metrics. Blackberry's basic "text only, it's faster" email interface just isn't enough for today's "picture perfect" communications world. So the need to bridge the gap - between "better than text but please, not Microsoft Outlook crash-ability!" caused me to search the web for some options.

My cyber-travels led me to a wonderful website: www.Crackberry.com  It's definitely the spot for every Berry-fanatic like me whose natural posture now represents a question-mark as we constantly read our Berry-screens. Full of goodies like ring-tones, new graphics themes and lots of accessories (get an upgraded battery there!) the software library is the place to find applications that will put your Blackberry on speed. (Yes, yes, drugs are bad... but play along now, will you?)

First in my findings was Empower HTML Viewer which adds just enough code to your Berry to let your emails show the pictures without significant decrease in performance. It integrates entirely onto the device, so you're not connecting to a website to "interpret" your messages, and they remain safely routed only to your device. It supports multiple fonts and it automatically caches the images as the email is received, so you can browse messages rapidly without having to download them every time you open the email. It even shows "Replies" in different colors - just like Outlook - so it's easier to track the back-and-forth between recipients in a message.

Here's a screen-shot of what your email can look like with Empower viewer installed.

But wait, there's more! For $30, this little product does something that even Microsoft doesn't do really well with Outlook. It allows you to open an email and then instantly turn it into a Task or an Appointment. With Outlook, you have to drag the email onto the calendar or the task bar, then create the item - how Solitaire-like! And Blackberry just didn't do that at all - so it was a major pain to reply "I'll call you at 10 am tomorrow" and then you had to go to the calendar and punch in a separate item, and retype critical info like names and phone numbers. No longer! Empower lets you reply, then just click to turn the entire email into the task or appointment. Just set the date and time and it's on your calendar. Very slick.

There's even a trial version, so you can check out Empower for a while; but you're going to buy it. You're going to be hooked once you add this little crack to your Berry!

Other Cracks to come soon....

- M