PDF Reader For The Blackberry Storm

There are so many questions about a PDF reader for the BlackBerry Storm. Let me try to explain what I have discovered so far. By default, the storm does not have a PDF reader installed; however you can still view PDF files when they are attached to an E-Mail. This is not the case when the PDF file is on the web or stored on the SD card. In order to open these files, you will need a 3rd party PDF reader.

There are several PDF readers for the Blackberry Storm, some are free and some are paid. BeamReader is the free reader I found from BeamBerry, it is still in Beta stage and it might have some bugs and glitches, but it is worth a try. Also in Beta, is the iSilo 5.05. iSilo is a highly versatile document reader that supports various file types and formats.

The most reliable pdf reader for the blackberry storm is from DataViz, they are the maker of Documents ToGgo. Word ToGo, SheetTo Go and Slideshow ToGo are included in the phone, however to get the PDF reader, you need to upgrade to the Premium Edition. Just open any Doc To Go Application inside the applications folder (Word To Go, Sheet To Go or Slideshow To Go) and choose Upgrade from the Menu.
RepliGo is another commercial Reader that supports multiple file formats, PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, RTF, CSV and zip archive. You can download a Trial Version from their site.

If you find any other PDF reader/viewer for the BlackBerry Storm, Please share in the comments section below.

Must Have Free BlackBerry Storm Applications

So what kind of applications is available for the BlackBerry Storm?
For the last 2 weeks, I have been testing some new applications on my new phone. Surprisingly, there is a good amount of free applications available to download, and I think every Blackberry Storm user should have these free applications installed on their phone.

My favorite is the WSJ Mobile Reader (Wall Street Journal). This application allows you to view headlines, full articles and summaries on your phone, You will also be able to customize the content based on keywords, category lists and other criteria, and you can track stock quotes, specific companies, and headlines, the quotes are usually delayed up to 30 minutes. Content will be delivered from The Wall Street Journal Digital Network, WJS.com. the newspapers, MarketWatch.com, AllThingsD.com, and Barrons.com.

Also in the news category I found Associated Press Mobile or AP Mobile, This application also gives you access to all the latest in Local, National, International, Entertainment, Sports, Business, Elections, Wacky, Technology and Government news. This is a great application that is fast and gives you news from a reputable sources. Again you can customize it to receive the local news of your city and area.

In the productivity department, my top pick is a PDF Reader from BeamBerry; BeamReader is the first full fidelity native PDF reader for the BlackBerry Storm. Now you can view your PDF e-mail attachments or PDF documents without any loss of quality. All of the original fonts, images and formatting is completely preserved. The BeamReader is currently in Beta, so you may experience problems when viewing certain documents. But so far I did not have any problems yet.

For the frequent traveler, you might download WorldMate Live for the Blackberry Storm. WorldMate helps you cope with the hassles of today’s business travel. Just forward your travel confirmation e-mail to the system and worldMate Live automatically assembles your Itinerary. It can notify you about changes in your flight in real time. (Delays or cancel flights). You also have access to travel information, such as maps and directions at your fingertips.

Did you know that your phone has a built in GPS receiver? And no, you are not locked to use the included VZ navigator($9.95/month for Verizon Customers) Nav4all is a free Application which lets you navigate worldwide on your own BlackBerry Storm Phone in North America, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, South Africa, Australia and soon in China as well. It is available for free until 01-01-2010. But to be fair, the VZnavigator performed much better in my geographical area (California).

How about streaming music? The FlyCast is a portable music and talk radio which works on your BlackBerry Storm. It has over 1000 unique channels that you can listen and watch, their channels lineup includes: sports, music, talk, news, spirituality, local station and weather information. Now you can hear your radio anywhere you have a signal.

Some of the applications that I have not tried yet are YouTube,TinyTwitter, MySpace, Google Maps, and Gmail. Let me know in the comments section of this blog if you had used any of these applications and please share you experience with us.

Please stay tuned as I test paid applications in the following days.

Your Blackberry Storm ID’s

Here is a quick tip of the day.

In addition of the regular SMS, and instant messaging that are included with your Blackberry Storm, you have a special instant messaging application that is exclusive to Blackberry users, it is called the BlackBerry Messenger it is inside the Instant Messaging folder on the Home Screen. To add a contact you just need either an email address or the number of the Storm.

To find the pin number, From the Home screen select
Menu>options>status.

In the status screen you will also find the ESN and IMEI for your Blackberry Storm.

I hope you are enjoying your new BlackBerry Storm Messaging Features.

Top 5 BlackBerry Storm Phone Tips

Here is another 5 quick tips on using some of the phone features on your BlackBerry Storm smartphone.

1) You can block your phone number from being displayed on other people phone without using the *67.

Phone>Menu>Options>General Options>
Change Restrict My Identity to “Always”
Menu>Save

From now on, your calls will show as “Private”.


2) Are you annoyed of all the missed calls showing up in your Massage Folder? Then Lets get rid of them once and for all.

Phone>Menu>Options>Call Logging
Select None
Menu>Save


3) How about a conference call with your new BlackBerry Storm. To add more people to your call in progress, do the following:

Menu>Add Participant>
You can either enter a phone number or choose a contact from your list
Send.

To add more people just repeat the above steps.


4) What is the Airplane Mode? If you are on a plane, you can turn off anything that transmits a signal. And still be able to use other functions of the phone such as games or music.

From the home screen, choose “Manage Connections”
Then choose “Turn All Connections Off”.
To turn it back on choose “Restore Connections”.


5) The small flashing green LED light on the front BlacBerry Storm, indicates that your are connected to the cellular network. I was getting annoyed with this light, especially at night. Here is how you can turn it off or on.

From your home screen choose “Options”
Then Screen/Keyboard
And choose your desired mode in the “LED Coverage indicator”


Stay tuned for more tips and tricks for the BlackBerry Storm Phone.

Get Your Music into the Storm.

Now that you got your Blackberry Storm, wouldn’t you like to transfer your music collection to your phone?

The new BlackBerry Storm comes with 8 Gig of Micro SD memory cards, which can hold a whopping 1500 songs. You can easily transfer your mp3, windows media player, and iTunes song to your device using one of the following steps.

The BlackBerry Storm can connect to your computer in If your collection is mostly mp3 files , you can either take your SD card and insert it in your PC card reader slot using the microSD to SD adapter . Then drag and drop your files to the SD card. If Removing the Micro SD card from the phone sounds like a hassle, you could also connect your Blackberry storm directly to your computer with the USB cable, the computer will automatically recognize it as a storage device and assign a drive letter to your, now again just drag and drop your files to the new folder.
On the other hand, you can use Windows Media Player 11 to Sync your files with the Blackberry Storm, Just plug the phone with the USB cable and WMP 11 should recognize it as a new sync device.

ITunes Lovers can also transfer their music to the Blackberry Storm using BlackBerry Media Sync software. BlackBerry Media Sync is compatible with 32-bit editions of Windows XP Service Pack 2 which requires iTunes version 7.0 or higher; AND 64 and 32-bit editions of Windows Vista which requires iTunes version 7.2 or higher BlackBerry Media Sync is a synchronization tool that is used for transferring media files from a BlackBerry Smartphone user's iTunes® music collection to the BlackBerry Smartphone.

To download BlackBerry® Media Sync 1.0.1 visit
http://www.blackberry.com/mediasync

Some of the Features of Media Sync are:

Gigabyte conversion

• The Home screen of BlackBerry Media Sync specifies the media card values in both MB and GB, depending on the size of the media card
Filter out categories or playlists containing 100% video content
• Playlists containing music can be selected in BlackBerry Media Sync
• Lists containing only video content will not be displayed (for example, playlists
consisting of only music videos)

Unsupported format or protected indicators when viewing playlists

• When clicking a playlist, the BlackBerry Smartphone user can view the number of tracks that are supported and the reasons why a specific track might not be transferred

No wonder the BlackBerry Storm is called the iphone Killer!!!.

Top 5 BlackBerry Storm Browser Tips

The BlackBerry Storm browser is designed to deliver on-the-go Internet service that can keep up with your busy life. A larger display that's also a touchscreen leads to a better web browsing experience.

The browser displays pages in an easy-to-read pane from which you can zoom in or out. You can use your fingers to navigate to areas off the screen that can't be seen at first, and links can be clicked by depressing the screen.
Holding the screen down reveals a toolbar that offers the choice of "Go To," Column View," "Cursor Mode," and zoom in or out.

Since the Blackberry Storm lacks Wi-Fi, you're limited to the speeds of Verizon's EV-DO network, which is fast enough for most purposes. Another browser discredit is the lack of support for sites like Pandora.com. YouTube.com is supported, though.

Here are 5 quick browser tips I found to be useful:

1) Set your browser configuration to open the web pages in full mode instead of the Mobile Version. An example is, yahoo has both Mobile Version for smartphones and full version for Pc’s if you go to Browser>Menu Key>Options>Browser Configuration>Browser Identification> set it to Internet Explorer or FireFox. You will never see the Mobile version of a website anymore.

2) In the browser window, if you just tap the screen without pressing or clicking, it will hide or show the (Zoom - Column View – Pointer) buttons at bottom of the screen.

3) You can copy and paste by placing one finger at the beginning of the text you want to copy, and another finger at the end, and then copy the text to the clipboard.

4) To zoom in, double tap on the screen and you are in column mode. To zoom back out, simply hit the Back hardware button.

5) To pan the zoomed area of the screen simply touch the screen and slide your finger in any direction to pan around the page

Top 5 BlackBerry Storm Touch Screen Tips

The lack of the physical keyboard on the blackberry storm From Verizon was intimidating at first. Since my previous phone was a palm treo, I was used to the QWERTY Keyboard to navigate my device. However upon using the The BlackBerry Storm I found out that it has three types of on-screen, virtual keyboards:

1) RIM's SureType keyboard, which is a QWERTY keyboard with more than one letter/number on each key (available only in portrait mode).
2) Multitap keyboard that resembles the keys on a traditional cell phone (portrait mode).
3) QWERTY like the one found on your computer keyboard (landscape mode only).

To switch back and forth between keyboards in portrait mode, simply click the BlackBerry Menu key whenever a keyboard is displayed, and click "Enable Multitap" or "Enable SureType."



The followings are 5 handy tips for using the touch screen on the blackberry storm smartphone from Verizon. It takes a while to get used to these features, especially if you are a previous QWERTY Keyboard user.

1) To quickly bring up the Storm's onscreen keyboard, swipe your finger upward from the very bottom of the screen to the middle.
2) To quickly hide the Storm's keyboard, swipe your finger downward from the top of the keyboard to the very bottom of the device's screen.
3) Special characters can be typed via Storm in both portrait (vertical) and landscape (horizontal) views. To enter in a special character while in portrait or landscape mode, bring up the on-screen keyboard, touch "any character " key, but don't click it, a number of options appear on screen. To choose that character, simply click it on screen.
4) To activate number lock, bring up the onscreen keyboard and then hold down the "123" key for about two seconds until a lock appears on that button. The number pad will then stay on screen until you either hide it or tap the "123" key again to return to the normal keyboard layout.
5) To activate capital lock, bring up the onscreen keyboard and then hold down the "Shift/Arrow Up" key for about two seconds until a lock appears on that button. The number pad will then stay on screen until you either hide it or tap the "Shift/Arrow Up" key again to return to the normal keyboard layout.
Stay tuned for more tips and tricks on using your Blackberry storm. In my next blogs I will explore the Web browser and give you my top 5 Tips & Tricks.

The Storm Has Arrived.

It’s finally here. The much anticipated world’s first touch screen BlackBerry Storm is now available through Vodafone in the UK, Ireland and Australia, Verizon Wireless in the United States, Telus and Bell in Canada..



The BlackBerry Storm, or BlackBerry Thunder, is a smartphone developed by Research In Motion (RIM). It is part of the 9500 series of phones. It is RIM's first touchscreen device and first device without a physical keyboard and will feature a touchscreen which reacts physically like a button via SurePress, a Research In Motion patented technology of providing haptic feedback. That is when you strike a key or icon on the Storm's screen, you feel a physical sensation, as if you were pressing a real key or button. That's because you are pressing a real button. The entire glass display is one large button, mounted on a mechanical substructure that allows it to move upon pressure. The idea behind this feature is to make typing on glass feel much more like typing on a real keyboard, and thus to make the virtual keyboard, and the touch interface, more acceptable to people used to physical keyboards and buttons. This push-down screen also replaces the side-mounted scroll wheel or track ball on other BlackBerrys for activating menu choices and icons.

It is intended to be a direct competitor to Apple iPhone, the T-Mobile G1 by HTC, HTC Touch Diamond, HTC Touch Pro and HTC Touch HD. The shape and dimensions are very close to that of the iPhone, but thicker by 7 millimeters and heavier, weighing 20 grams (0.71 oz) more.
The Blackberry Storm is a world-phone, featuring CDMA with EV-DO Rev. A data, UMTS with HSDPA, and quad-band GSM with EDGE data access speed.

The BlackBerry Storm offers a surprising amount of innovation and usability for a touchscreen business phone. The clickscreen navigation setup works very well, and deftly solves the problem of dealing with RIM's long menus on a touchscreen phone. Typing on the BlackBerry Storm's keyboard is better than typing on any other touchscreen. Productivity apps are also top-notch, especially thanks to the included DataViz Documents To Go suite—good for opening and editing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. And of course, hundreds of third-party BlackBerry—ranging from games and RSS readers to Facebook and MySpace apps—are available online.
Multimedia options are plentiful, including easy-to-use music and video players. You can listen to your tunes over stereo Bluetooth headsets or using the 3.5mm earphone jack, and the phones comes with 1GB of internal storage and an 8GB microSD card.

Also making an appearance is a very capable 3.2-MP camera. While it lacks the fancypants lenses found in better camera phones, it does have a flash and snaps off some pretty decent, noiseless pics. Also included is a video recorder.

Web surfing on the device is good, not great. The fully realized browser pulls up pages quickly but also suffers from a lack of flash support. Cut-and-paste functionality works almost perfectly, as does text editing. All of RIM’s e-mail goodness and top-shelf messaging are also effortlessly integrated into the device. For better or for worse, you never forget that you are using a BlackBerry.

As I use the phone I will add more reviews and tips to this blog.