Blackberry Apps

[mitunnelrat]

My fiancee got a free upgrade this month and handed me her old blackberry Curve as an upgrade to my last phone. I've been browsing the apps, but if anyone else owns one, is there anything you'd recommend (like the police scanner, for instance) that dovetail with emergency prep or even organization?

[RedJohn]

Sorry, iPhone user here, but not for long. I may go android though. What OS is BB?

[mitunnelrat]

bb has its own OS from what I remember. I'm just waking up and can't recall the details atm. Its an awesome phone though, I've loved its ability to stream data.

[Grumpy Old Man]

Huh! And here I always thought that Blackberry apps meant jam applied to toast. I'm hopelessly archaic. I have a shortwave receiver for scanning and keeping in touch with the outside world. But as the commercials say "There's an App for that".

[mitunnelrat]

From the looks of things, there's an app for damn near anything! So far I've only downloaded The Weather Channel's app, a couple minor games, and Pandora radio. I'm still browsing what seems to be a never ending list of other apps, and trying to find freebies so I don't surprise my fiancee with extra charges on her bill. Some things, like the police scanner, I'll ask to add. Another one I'm looking at is called imapmyrun, which allows you to log and follow routes through GPS, tracks your speed, and does several other things too. I found its available for iphone and android as well as Blackberries, which is indeed a proprietary OS, called RIM - Research In Motion.

On the other side of this phone is its communicatinos capabilities, which I already love, even though I don't have that totally figured out yet either. My fiancee had one touch access to her email, I'm using that same key for text messaging. I can access this site with one touch as well, if I don't do anything else with the phone's web browser, and I can access social media within two presses of a button. If you can get past the rampant douchbaggery on such sites you can glean regional information from across a large area with relative ease, and communicate to a large group at once. That strikes me as inherently useful.

I'll end in saying none of this technology is my primary means of anything, I still have more traditional methods available (like a map and compass) but I do love adding tools to my box that simplify and speed things up. It looks like this phone is going to be a force multiplier for me in some ways.

[alaska]

Evil phones.
I have a pay by the minute phone and its really cool, you can make phone calls with it AND TEXT!!!! its the damndest thing.
So there -neener neener

[beginner]

Mit, what's the pandora radio? What model Curve do you have? I think mine is the 8520....

[bacpacker]

I don't know anything about the Blackberries. I got a droid last year and have found some useful apps for it. The ones I've gotten have all been freebies. I've found several for ham radio, a antenna builder calculator, echolink, winlink, and a couple others. One I use a lot is a Excel type app, I use it to write up a parts list for a electrical project I'm working on, and have started a inventory of preps in the basement. There is a couple for tracking shopping list, a very nice one for tracking gas milage and maintenance on multiple vehicles. A scanner program that lets you select a city and what type freq your looking for, ham radio, news and music, police, fire, etc. Calculator programs as a stand alone, for running electrical wireing. A bar code scanner that you can use in a store to scan a product, it'll give you the manufactures website, ingrediants, suggested price, MSDS info, even a locator for the product your looking for. There is literally thousands of apps for many things.
I found a searchable KJ version of the bible thats very nice. And Pandora, which allows you to select music by band and will automatically run more songs from that era and style. It's also available on the internet at
Pandora Radio - Listen to Free Internet Radio, Find New Music (http://www.pandora.com).