Tag Archives: Waterloo

About 1937 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Six BlackBerry Shortcuts for Business

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If you’re one of the millions of mobile businesspersons who use — and rely upon — a BlackBerry smartphone from Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion (RIM), you might not be getting the most out of your handheld device. Oh sure, you take advantage of its reliable “push e-mail,” phone, document viewing and perhaps GPS functionality, but there are a handful of keyboard shortcuts and other assorted tips that can help save you time and aggravation. “When you think about the fact that people often use their BlackBerry for brief and intermittent tasks throughout the day, it’s easy to understand why they want it to be super-intuitive — after all, technology should make your life simpler,” says Mark Guibert, vice president of corporate marketing at RIM. “Some of the most commonly used BlackBerry shortcuts are the ones that make it easier to type messages faster or help you find information quicker.” Richard Shim, research manager for personal computing at IDC, a Framingham, Mass.-based market research firm, says BlackBerrys are productivity tools, and anything you can do to enhance productivity is a benefit to the user. “Navigation, for example, is important on a device with a small screen, so shortcuts that help you navigate easier are a plus.” “Similarly, e-mail on small keyboard could also be a challenge so any shortcut you can build in is a bonus.” The following are a few good shortcuts to consider. Unless otherwise specified, these tips should work with all newer BlackBerry models (8700, 8800 series) but might also work with older handsets, too. When in doubt, check your handset’s documentation or RIM’s website. Easily lock the BlackBerry How many times has your BlackBerry accidentally called someone when slipped into your pocket or purse (or worse, at 1 a.m.)? While we’d still like to see an iPod-like switch on top of the BlackBerry to lock its keyboard, try this as a next-best-thing. A small Stand-By button lies at the top of the handset (near the power button). It might look like a speaker with a slash through it. Hold it down for a second and it will say “Entering Standby Mode,” and your screen will go dark. Essentially this locks your keyboard until you press the Stand-By button again, and yes you will still get incoming phone calls and e-mails. Speed dial If there’s a business contact, family member, or friend you call regularly, you can assign them a speed-dial letter, which is a breeze to use. On QWERTY- and SureType-based BlackBerrys, simply hold down a button from the main screen, such as F, and you will see a pop-up window that says “Assign a Speed Dial to the F key?” After you select “Yes,” it opens your address book to select the contact you wish to assign to that letter (such as home for “H”). If you want to call into your voice mail, the fastest way to do it is to hold down the 1 key. E-mail reading shortcuts Navigating through all your e-mail can be a time-consuming process. Ever stepped off a long flight, turned your BlackBerry on, and found 75 messages in your inbox? Here are a few cool shortcuts: When inside an e-mail, click the N button to go to the “next” message. This is much faster than exiting the e-mail and then scrolling down to open the next one. Press the P button to go to the “previous” e-mail. To jump down a page in a long e-mail, press the Space (spacebar) button. To move up a page, press Shift button and the spacebar at any time. If you’re at the end of a lengthy message and want to quickly go back to the top — don’t scroll all the way up — instead press the T button to move your cursor back to the “top” of the screen. When reading an e-mail, reply to the message quickly by pressing the R key, reply to all by pressing the L or forward the message by pressing the F key. Faster e-mail addresses If you’re manually typing in an email address — such as one that’s being read to you over the phone — you don’t need to enter the symbols area to type “@” and “.” as in mary@smith.com. Instead, when typing an e-mail address into the To, Cc or Bcc field, simply press the spacebar where the “@” and “.” symbols should go and your BlackBerry will automatically place those common symbol there. On a related note, anytime you want to type a period when drafting an e-mail, you can do it quicker but tapping the spacebar twice. Switch between applications quickly “One of my favorites is the ALT-ESCAPE shortcut for switching applications,” adds RIM’s Guibert. “Try sharing that shortcut with a BlackBerry user for the first time and you’ll gain a friend for life.” Delete e-mails quickly You’ve got an inbox full of read messages on your BlackBerry, dating back a week or two. Time for some spring cleaning? There’s a speedy way to do this opposed to clicking on the first e-mail message, holding down the Shift button, and then scrolling to the last one in order to highlight them all. Instead, select a date field, visible in between your emails, such as “Sun, Jan 27, 2008″ and then choose the option to “Delete Prior.” As you might guess, all e-mails sent prior to this date will be deleted from the BlackBerry.

About 2029 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

BlackBerry Applications for Business

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Suffice it to say, the BlackBerry has become an indispensable tool for millions of small and mid-size businesses, largely in part to its reliable push-mail solution that delivers messages to your phone as soon as they arrive in an inbox. But in order to maintain its competitive edge, the Waterloo, Ontario-based Research in Motion understands it needs to open up its doors to third-party applications to help businesses remain productive while on the go. “There has been phenomenal growth in applications available for the BlackBerry platform,” confirms Tyler Lessard, director of independent software vendor alliances at Research in Motion. “We are signing new partners every day and being approached constantly by people who are looking for ways to increase the mobile capabilities of their applications using the BlackBerry solution.” The following are a few recommended applications that can help you and your employees stay in touch, keep organized and remain competitive, wherever business takes you. Be sure to check with your cell carrier for availability and pricing. TeleNav Rather than purchase a separate GPS unit to help you navigate from point A to B without getting lost, or finding relevant location-based info, a GPS-enabled BlackBerry lets you have it all on one device. Small and mid-size businesses “especially benefit from services like TeleNav because they save on travel time and they reduce the need for road warriors to call in for guidance,” says Carmi Levy, senior vice president for strategic consulting at AR Communications, a Toronto-based marketing communications firm. “[Employees] work more independently, consuming less office time and spending more time in front of customers.” eOffice from DynoPlex eOffice lets you easily access and manage all your documents, wherever and whenever — all stored remotely on your office PC, through a password-protected virtual hard disk on the Internet. As if it were stored locally on the smartphone, you can now retrieve, review, edit, and save documents — such as Microsoft Word or Excel files. “Attachments are an increasingly frequent reality for anyone who sends and receives e-mail, and although the basic BlackBerry OS allows Office files to be viewed, the experience is severely limited,” says Levy. “DynoPlex’s eOffice is often good enough that users can leave their laptops at home and travel lighter on business trips.” SpinVox This voicemail-to-text service can save you time because there’s no need to dial in to pick up your voice mail. Instead, an accurate transcript of the voicemail message is text messaged to you automatically so you can simply read the message on your BlackBerry. After all, you might be in a meeting and unable to answer that important call from a client, your boss, or a member of your staff. Well, now you can discretely glance at a text message which has the content of the voicemail message on your phone. Nuance Voice Control from Nuance Communications Consider it an alternative to using your thumbs to type your way through all of your BlackBerry’s functions — such as making calls, drafting an e-mail or adding a calendar entry — as you can use the power of your voice to take command. Your spoken words are transcribed into text for, say, an e-mail message, or you can choose to send your voice clip as an e-mail attachment. “Voice-activated control and navigation can remove the last barrier to on-the-road productivity — the tiny keyboard — from potential objections to wider mobile deployment,” explains Levy. WebMessenger from Apptix This all-in-one instant messaging (IM) client supports a broad range of services, including AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Google Talk, ICQ, and Jabber. For small and mid-size businesses with mobile employees that need to routinely interact with the home office in real-time, “the presence awareness offered by an always-on IM client can be a compelling driver of productivity,” says Levy. “Road warriors can get answers to their questions more quickly, which allows them to spend more time servicing customers and less time waiting around.” Other BlackBerry applications to check out: “We find that organizations are interested in applications that access [small business] CRM and accounting packages such as Goldmine, ACT, and Quicken,” says RIM’s Lessard. Impatica Showmate allows mobile professionals to deliver PowerPoint presentations directly from their BlackBerry smartphone. MobiMate’s Worldmate Live and Handmark’s PocketExpress can greatly enhance personal productivity and efficiency while traveling with tools that include flight status updates, rental car information, and world weather. Virtual Reach’s Viigo is an RSS reader that can track, download, and display critical pieces of regularly updated content, such as news, stock values, and sports.

About 2425 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

What’s Behind BlackBerry Addiction

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You’re out with your family enjoying a baseball game and take a moment to survey the seats around you: The two gentlemen to your left are looking not at the field but down at their laps as they grip a small black device, while a woman to your left has one arm around her young daughter and the other is skillfully thumbing a small wheel on the side of the same ubiquitous gadget. Such is a typical sight in today’s day and age — whether it’s at a sporting event, on a commuter train, in a restaurant, mall, or even at a wedding. The almighty BlackBerry communication device from Research in Motion, of Waterloo, Ontario, lets you stay in constant communication with your colleagues, clients, or customers, wherever and whenever. For the uninitiated, the BlackBerry is a “push” e-mail solution, which means the device vibrates or chimes as new messages arrive in your inbox so you can read and/or reply. This process is more convenient because you don’t have to log on to the Net to “pull” down messages to the handset, as you do on a desktop or laptop computer. It’s also a cell phone, Web browser, and personal organizer; think of it as your office in your pocket. Because many users say they become dependent on real-time e-mail communication on the go, and because the device is seen being used virtually everywhere, the BlackBerry has been dubbed the “Crackberry.” But is it really addictive “The term ‘addiction’ is predominately a tongue-in-cheek compliment about the appeal of the product,” says Mark Guibert, vice president of corporate marketing for Research in Motion. “I don’t know too many people truly addicted — it’s kind of like being a ‘chocoholic’.” Guibert says the BlackBerry may give the impression businesspersons are forever tethered to it in public — in the elevator, on the street, in a taxi. But its appeal lies in the fact you can get a lot more work done with small intermittent moments throughout the day instead of slaving over a PC in the office all in one sitting. Since entrepreneurs and small-to-medium-sized business owners often wear multiple hats, they need to be reachable by customers or clients, even when they’re out of the office, at home, or at a ballgame with their kids. Taking BlackBerry on vacation There are BlackBerry users who go the extreme. They surf the Web with one hand while walking the dog in the morning. Some “relax” with their devices in bed so they can check their e-mail when they feel the vibration before dozing off. And then there are the folks who take their BlackBerry on vacation. Being connected 24/7 does have its share of drawbacks, according to Michael Gartenberg, research director of client access and technologies at Jupiter Media in Darien, Conn. But instead of looking at the BlackBerry in terms of interrupting one’s social life, he says in reality it’s the other way around. Busy entrepreneurs only have a social life because they can keep connected to work via BlackBerry. “I don’t think it’s as much of an addiction — it just reinforces the importance of being connected in today’s world,” says Gartenberg. “It’s because of the BlackBerry they can be present at a social event, which wasn’t possible a few years ago.” As for taking the BlackBerry to Hawaii or Key West, well, there’s a justification for that. “Personally, I’d rather spend 15 minutes a day on a vacation on my BlackBerry than face 2000 messages in my inbox when I return,” adds Gartnerberg. “Plus, what kind of relaxing vacation will you have knowing e-mails are piling up back at the office?”

About 3185 days ago PCs, Laptops, and Notebooks

Cell Phone Madness

At first glance, it seems like a bad deal, a kind of techno demotion. But Gregg Davis, CIO of Webcor Building, a San Mateo, Calif., construction company, is making the pitch anyway: You give me your notebook computer, he’s telling his employees, and I’ll give you a new cell phone. Of course, these are no ordinary phones. They’re more like hot rods, supercharged beyond recognition. Packed with 32 megabytes of memory, a 144-megahertz processor, a thumb keyboard, and a 1.8-inch color screen, the slick-looking devices come loaded with Palm organizer software and a Blazer Web browser, and can run Microsoft Outlook, Word, Excel, and other core business applications. Users can read and send e-mail, view PDFs, inspect and make changes to documents, review change orders, and even pull up drawings to inspect with architects at construction sites. They can also call the office to check voice mail. “I feel more connected than I did with my notebook,” says Webcor CFO Tim J. Lutz. The phone is a Treo 600, made by Handspring, and so far about 20 Webcor employees have traded in their laptops for one. Davis sweetened the deal by throwing in a new desktop computer, but each trade-in still saves Webcor money. The price of its standard notebook, about $1,800, is more than the cost of a Treo and a typical desktop combined. What’s more, support costs for notebooks run much higher than for desktops, while cellular communications costs have gone up only about $10 a month per user. Just a year ago, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, to do what Webcor is doing. There were some decent handheld e-mail readers, notably the BlackBerry from Research In Motion, based in Waterloo, Ontario. But it was hard to get other applications on the screen, and the devices didn’t work very well as cell phones. As a result, most executives traveled with a PDA, a mobile phone, and a notebook computer. But so-called “smart phones” like the Treo 600, which hit the market about a year ago, are beginning to change that. In 2004, just 9% of the cell phones shipped in North America were smart phones. In 2005, the number is expected to hit nearly 18%, according to the Zelos Group in San Francisco. “People who access information and respond to it in, say, small e-mails, are going to quickly find that they don’t need their notebooks,” says Andrew M. Seybold, president of Outlook4Mobility, a consultancy in Santa Barbara, Calif. Even people who write reports and perform data entry tasks will find themselves leaving the notebook behind on trips of less than three days, Seybold says. Even people who write reports and do data entry will find themselves leaving their notebook computers behind. Laptops, of course, aren’t going away anytime soon and for some kinds of employees, never will. No smart phone is smart enough to run animated PowerPoint presentations or be used for, say, three- or four-dimensional modeling. But thanks to a confluence of technology trends — better hardware, faster cellular networks, more sophisticated software, and a new ability to make them all work together — more road warriors will be leaving the laptop behind. As these four trends gather steam, expect this year’s smart phones to become next year’s superphones. Cooler Hardware Danny Shader, CEO of Good Technology, a Sunnyvale, Calif., outfit whose Goodlink software has helped transform cell phones into smart phones, expects to see an explosion of such devices over the next year. These phones will be packed with as much as 500 megabytes of memory and come in a menagerie of shapes and sizes. Many will feature color displays, which will be brighter and easier to read. Keyboards — whether the “thumb-boards” made popular by BlackBerry or new, unusual slide-out designs — will be commonplace. Motorola’s MPX smart phone, due out later this year, is one of several phones that will open up to look like miniature notebook computers, right down to the QWERTY keyboard. Seimens, for its part, is taking the keyboard in even weirder directions: The company is developing the SX-1, a phone that uses a laser to project a virtual full-size keyboard onto a flat surface. There’s more. Nvidia, beloved by gamers for its superfast graphics chips, now makes chipsets for cell phones, which will allow videoconferencing and let you download and view video-based presentations. Intel has developed similar technology. Meanwhile, processors for phones are getting faster, headed toward the 600-megahertz range. That’s slower than many desktop and laptop computers but still fast enough to read e-mail and run many Web applications and basic documents. Also on the way: dual-mode Wi-Fi phones, which can switch between a cellular network and a company’s own computer network. Philips, for its part, is readying chipsets to turn phones into AM/FM radios, or to receive digital satellite transmissions. Such gee-whiz features are aimed primarily at consumers and signal just how much change is coming to the plain old cell phone. The price tag for such phones: between $450 and $800, with a service agreement, though prices are expected to drop in 2005. One word of caution: “Just because you can do all those things doesn’t mean you wind up with a computer,” says Seamus McAteer, senior analyst at the Zelos Group. One big problem with these new devices, McAteer points out, is the state of the wireless communications networks. As any cell phone user knows, there are still plenty of dead spots out there. What’s more, most networks transmit data at 20 to 30 kilobits per second. That’s much faster than networks were a couple of years ago, but even a slow DSL line runs at about 350 kilobits a second. Wireless providers like Verizon and Sprint are working to upgrade their networks, but until they do, viewing webpages on your superphone will take some patience. Sophisticated Software Still, software providers are hard at work, creating new platforms to make the process run more smoothly. Research In Motion and Good Technology, for example, are working on applications that will make it possible for smart phones to run heavy-duty corporate applications. And a host of other outfits, ranging from behemoths like Microsoft to tiny start-ups, are targeting the business smart-phone user. James L. Balsillie, chairman and co-CEO of RIM, predicts “astounding” changes here. “You’re going to see a 10-times increase in application diversity,” he says. Here’s a short list of what’s on the way: Orative Corp., a start-up in San Jose, Calif., makes software that treats phone calls like e-mail, giving businesses the ability to send phone messages with subject lines, urgency tags, and status alerts (such as, “Always ring if it’s the CEO”). Software by Chicago-based BridgePort Networks links cellular and corporate Ethernet networks, allowing cell phones to run on voice over Internet protocol. This will be particularly helpful if you’re in a foreign country without the right kind of cell phone — just plug the phone into your computer and use the Internet to make the call. BridgePort’s software is currently being tested at several large phone companies, and it hopes to announce its first deals this fall. Pulling It All Together Making all this technology work together can still cause migraines, particularly for smaller companies that lack in-house tech talent. Fortunately, there are outsourced services from companies like Centerbeam, based in San Jose, and LAN Logic, based in Livermore, Calif., that will handle the heavy-duty network back-end and server software, so that smaller businesses can start using superphones without having to maintain the software. This is of particular use because it’s still a challenge to get the software and hardware to work well together over cellular networks. “You can do a lot of stuff, but it’s so complex and cumbersome,” says Tony Davis, CEO of Tira Wireless, a Canadian company that publishes cell phone applications. Davis had hoped to see far more smart-phone applications available by now, but as is often the case with wireless anything, it’s taken longer than expected. Still, he’s convinced that 2005 will see the emergence of cell phones as serious business tools. Webcor’s Gregg Davis, for his part, expects to have more employees clamoring to exchange their notebook computers. It’s easy to see why. Before getting their hands on the Treo 600s, managers at job sites would generally see e-mail only at the beginning and end of each day. Now, they’re in touch throughout the day. And it’s not just e-mail messages. While traveling one day, for example, Davis needed to look at a sophisticated network topography diagram. The document was far too large and complicated to view on the Treo’s tiny screen. But rather than cursing himself for leaving his laptop behind, Davis downloaded the document, put it on a flash-memory card (a sort of portable and tiny hard drive), and then viewed it on a nearby PC with a bigger screen. Not a techno demotion, after all.