A lot of the radio dialog uses 10 codes, a kind of shorthand you’ve likely heard used on TV shows involving police or fire. A reference to the meanings of these 10 codes can be found at the link here.

Here in Orange County, we’re able to pick up the Orange County Fire radio calls countywide. Unfortunately, police and CHP calls aren’t possible since those are encrypted channels.

The app has a free 7 day trial, so no reason not to give it a try. To get a sense of what will be available to you on your  BlackBerry®, head over to Radio Reference and listen in to those channels that interest you. Both the app and the online Radio Reference site are a great way to get a taste of radio scanning without the expense of actually buying a scanner!

It is basically a service that allows you to collect information, links, files, etc in one place, all synchronized to the various devices that Evernote supports;

• Windows/Mac OSX
• iPod, iPad
• Blackberry
• Palm Pre
• Web Clipper

The windows client is a dream. Uses SQLite under the hood to maintain a local database of your stuff that is sync’d to Evernote’s servers.  The real beauty here is that all this stuff is available to you anywhere, from your Blackberry, your laptop, even any place you can get to a web browser. And because there’s a copy on Evernote’s servers, you have built-in painless backup you can get to easily to recover your data from a local crash.

Getting stuff into Evernote is easy;

• The web clipper let’s you send entire pages or parts of pages direct to Evernote.
• The Blackberry client let’s you send pictures and sound recordings, as well as locally produced notes direct to Evernote.
• The Windows client supports drag and drop direct into Evernote.
• You get a special Evernote email address that you can use to email anything you want added to your Evernote database.

Once the stuff is there, you can easily organize it with tags and search it with Evernote’s powerful search capabilities. I love this app,  I’m not all that organized, so having a place to just dump things and later be able to easily search and locate what I am looking for is a delight.

Highly recommended.

• If an email has exactly one attachment, the menu function ceases to work when you are viewing the email. This has the side effect of making it impossible to do anything with the attachment.

An email to Empower’s support has yet to be answered. Googling the problem turns up other reports of Blackberry users on OS 4.5 having the same issue and same non-response from support.

Until this issue is resolved, I do not recommend spending your money on this product.

Well, it wasn’t. First, the installer weighed in at a hefty 68 meg, and either their servers are slow or my network connection was unusually slow, it took several hours to download. Then comes the actual update itself. First the installer updates the Blackberry Manager Desktop software, then it prompts you to hook up the Blackberry and it basically does a backup, deletes everything on the device, then installs the new OS and software and restores the data.

Sounds straightforward, right? Here’s what happened.

• No one mentioned that any Outlook Recurring appointments for full days will get totally screwed up by the restore process. When you run the next sync, the appointments on the device side all have their times messed up and they sync to Outlook as changes that cause every ‘all day’ appointment to suddenly become a multi-day appointment. Very aggravating. The solution here is to change the sync setting on the calendar to one way from Outlook to the device, this needs to be done BEFORE you do the OS update. Then you can update, sync replacing the bad device calendar with Outlooks good calendar, reset the sync settings and you are back in business.
• The Blackberry device OS install and subsequent restore take a long time and it is not at all obvious that something hasn’t hung. More than several times during the process I was tempted to cancel out thinking that it was hung up, it isn’t, you simply need to be very very patient.
• No one mentioned that upgrading the OS would wipe out the settings on virtually all 3rd party software you have installed on your Blackberry. I ran into these specific problems;
  • Empower HTML Mail Viewer Pro –  The version pre-upgrade would not reinstall correctly. After emailing Empower support, I was advised to visit www.getempower.com to download and install the latest version. That solution worked.
  • Documents to Go – It isn’t entirely obvious that the Documents to Go is included in the OS upgrade. They uncheck the box to install it during the upgrade (probably since it wasn’t an existing app on the device) and unless you go back into the Application Loader and check that box, it will not be on your device. Also, the version shipped with the upgrade does not include the Excel piece, you need to update Documents to Go after installing it to get that piece.
  • Spades – The game registration is lost during the upgrade. You will need your code to reregister the game.
  • Folders – Any folders you created on the Blackberry are blown away.
  • Viigo – All of your settings, including registration, are lost during the upgrade. You’ll need your Viigo user and password to get going again and all feeds will start over fresh.
  • Google Maps, Opera Mini – These and other apps will all start in their original installation mode, asking you to accept license terms and defaulting to out of the box settings.
  • Keepass – The first sync after the OS upgrade will fail. You will need to open the Keepass application on the desktop and open it on the Blackberry one time each before syncing again, then it will work fine.

All of the above ‘gotchas’ were time consuming to figure out and fix. The entire OS upgrade process is far more time consuming than one would expect, so be sure to set aside a 2 – 3 hour block of time just in case. It is not simple and not painless.

The price is very reasonable, $4.99 at this writing, and the gameplay (so far) is ok. Tho, just like the Spades I played on the Palm, my partner at times seems incredibly dumb.

Recommended.

I’ve waited and waited for Iliumsoft to come thru with the promised eWallet for Blackberry originally scheduled for release July 2008.

No longer will I wait. I’ve found a solution that works for me, Keepass, the open source password manager, with the following pieces to the eWallet puzzle;

• A plug-in eWallet converter that takes an exported eWallet text file and imports it into Keepass.
• A windows desktop client (Mac and Linux versions also available).
• A Blackberry client that includes near full sync (deletes are not supported, you have to manually delete from both sides to keep them in sync with deletions).

This completely free solution works and is available right now. I was up and running in about 30 minutes with the most difficult part being the somewhat cryptic instructions on configuring the sync in the Blackberry desktop.

For those former Palm users who are now on the Blackberry having extreme eWallet withdrawal pains, check out Keepass, you won’t regret it.

This is the second time I’ve gone this route, and this time I took some notes since it is frustrating to get it to work.

1. The install disk that comes with the Curve from Verizon has Blackberry Desktop 4.3 on it. This version won’t handle the conversion, so a trip to the Blackberry site for Version 4.5 was in order.
2. The Treo desktop software also won’t work. A downgrade to PalmOne’s Version 4.14e is needed on the Treo side. Interestingly, I had to first install 4.14e, then after the install completed, I had to reinstall it using the repair option (first time thru actually did not leave a palm.exe file installed, no idea why, but that’s a major oversight).
3. Obviously, Outlook is required on the PC involved.
4. Before beginning the conversion, open the Palm desktop software and for each of Calendar, Todos, Address Book, and Memopad, use the Tools -> Options -> Tools -> Check and Repair Corruption options to make sure the Palm datafile is corruption free.
5. Use the Blackberry device switch option to switch from the Treo to the Blackberry. If you have the correct versions as noted above, the option to convert from a Palm Treo will not be greyed out. If it is, re-check your software versions.

Hope this helps some other poor sole from frustration!

Enter the Blackberry. The Curve is a really nice device. No too big and not too small, great screen, great sound and 100% handsfree bluetooth dialing. The only downside I could find was having to give up the Palm Desktop and eWallet.

I really really dislike Outlook. The simplicity of Palm’s Desktop software along with Thunderbird as a mail client have been working well for me for many years now. Changing would be painful.

I also find eWallet an indispensable tool that I can’t do without. Good news there is that IliumSoft is working on a Blackberry version of eWallet that they promise to release real soon now.

After much introspection and second guessing myself, I finally went ahead with the Blackberry Curve. Spent a weekend of pain jumping through hoops to get the data off the Palm moved to Outlook so it would sync with the new Blackberry (that is a story in itself, not easy but doable).

Now that I’m there, I’m delighted. RIM did a great job on the Curve, the setup was a snap and the Desktop Manager seems to work well. Other than the pain of working with Outlook, I couldn’t be happier.

Now, if IliumSoft would just release eWallet….

Love the Blackberry Curve. This device is a joy to use.  RIM really did a good job on it and I couldn’t be happier.