Weather Plus
It’s difficult to find a mobile phone user who doesn’t care about the weather forecast. BlackBerry (BB) users are no exception, and for a while, everything was functioning perfectly well, since there was an official RIM (Research In Motion) application that did the job correctly. However, at some point, RIM was asked to change this (which was probably asserted with a fine financial incentive) and introduce The Weather Channel, which works just as well, except that it doesn’t support three quarters of the world’s countries. Therefore, the user should pick an alternative, and alternatives are numerous in this regard. We find Weather Plus to be the best, since it’s relatively simple, which saves you battery and CPU cycles, supports many locations and features multi-day forecast. The commercial version offers home screen integration, and promotional campaigns that offer commercial functionality for free aren’t a rare feat either.
Most likely the most downloaded of the applications on BlackBerry World. There are many types of Facebook users, but few of them will disregard the need to check their live feed while on-the-go, waiting in a queue or simply lying comfortably in a sofa. Unlike the mobile rendition of Facebook, this application is much better adjusted, while taking up only 1 MB of space. Since this application comes from RIM directly, good integration is a must - you’re able to synchronise your phone and Facebook contacts, and with the latest version, you can even use Facebook’s emailing system as if it were an ordinary email account. Calendar integration is very interesting, so if you aren’t too paranoid as far as online privacy is concerned, all your phone calendar scheduled events will be uploaded to Facebook, while birthday info will be downloaded from the website. The current version of the app is 1.9, but there’s still room for performance improvement, so occasional slow-downs shouldn’t be too much of a surprise to you.
Another RIM program, written to inject some Twitter into your device. As expected, it integrates into your phonebook and enables direct communication with Twitter without the need to run another program. In case that some of the people you follow have new tweets, you’ll get a general new message notification, and when you click on that one, the Twitter client will be run. The client itself contains neatly packed options, logically placed, while work is simple and comfortable. Although it functions like a push application, it isn’t really one, so you have to set a time interval to check for new tweets. As all other RIM-signed software, low CPU and memory requirements go without saying, with a minimum of bugs present.
Dropbox
This tiny program enables you to access your data hosted on the developers’ servers, and the service doesn’t lose any of its desktop PC functionality. Files can be copied, deleted and edited. Everything is done swiftly, server synchronisation is momentary, so that even shared files get updated almost in real-time. If you log into the service on your desktop PC, you’re able to track changes and revert the last ones made, which isn’t available on-the-go, but is likely to be implemented in one of the upcoming versions.
Shazam
It’s probably occurred to you more than a few times to be sitting in a café or listening to the radio while a nice-sounding song is being played. You know nothing about it and have no one around to ask for the name or the artist behind the song. This is where Shazam comes in to help - when you’ve started the application, it begins recording sound automatically, sends the result file to the server for analysis and usually returns a correct result on the song and artist in question. If you like it, you can buy it straight away, while the free version is limited to merely five “recognitions” per month, so use it wisely.
MemoryUp Personal
This tiny, simple program is indispensable to users running on older BB devices. When it’s run, it provides information on the memory utilisation, i.e. how much memory you have left at disposal. The free version doesn’t have the ability to kill processes separately, but there is a Quick Boost option which enables automatic memory purge. This way, when you get carried away and open one program too many (if not more), you can free up some of your RAM and go on with your work, without the need to restart your BB.
