Tong Family

With a shiny new Blackberry 8700c, it’s fun to see what the power nerds are doing to make it fast and personal, here are some great sites to follow:

* “Blackberry Forums”:http://blackberryforums.com. This is pretty active and the “8700”:http://www.blackberryforums.com/forumdisplay.php?f=52 forum has some good things on problems and new software like a video player.
* “RIMarkable”:http://www.rimarkable.com/. A blog of rumors including that about a Wifi Blackberry.
* Perhaps the best news is that Cingular is relenting on “unlocking”:http://www.blackberryforums.com/showthread.php?t=40105 with some folks just asking Cingular for an unlock code. In olden days, they were pretty difficult about it, but seems like they are more reasonable now.
* “Cingular”:http://forums.cingular.com/cng/board?board.id=rim itself now has a decent set of forums for BlackBerry.
* Once you’ve unlocked your Blackberry, you can use other operating systems that are customized for other carriers like “Bharti”:http://blackberryforums.pinstack.com/showthread.php?t=1195. Quite a few folks are using Hong Kong CLS since it supports Chinese language input and output. “Pinstack OS listing”:http://blackberryforums.pinstack.com/showthread.php?t=3311 even lists all the various carrier specific operating systems across the world so you can find “CSL”:http://1010.hkcsl.com/jsp/biz_1010solution/biz_1010solution_1010office_bb_i_help_ very easily.
* BTW, you can access everything on “Pinstack”:http://blackberryforums.pinstack.com from their “wap.pinstack.com”:http://wap.pinstack.com site.
* “Ringtones”:http://www.pinstack.com/tones/. The 8700 takes some wierd MP3 format I haven’t studied. Here are some ringtones. Not really clear how to get them down to the 8700 though.
* “Video”:http://blackberryforums.pinstack.com/showthread.php?t=3378. SonaMobile has a video player for the 8700g in beta.
* “Coolservice.dk”:http://www.coolservice.dk/. This is some sort of free uploader that takes your content, makes it a WAP site that the phone can then download.
* “WirelessAdivsor.com”:http://forums.wirelessadvisor.com/cingular-wireless-users/. Another forum for cingular users.
* There are lots of folks who will for a fee ranging from $24 to $150 say that they will unlock your phone if your carrier won’t. For instance there is “superunlock”:http://superunlock.com/product_info.php?products_id=44
* “ExchangeMyMail.com”:http://www.exchangemymail.com/. This is one of a number of hosted solutions that lets you have an Exchange serve in the sky so if you are startup you get calendar sync mainly.

Finally I also now have an LG CU320 mainly so I could say I have a 3G phone. Its first to market so not clearly the best. No one for instance knows how to “unlock”:http://www.howardforums.com/showthread.php?threadid=897117 it. Right now Cingular will give you the unlock code but LG won’t tell you how to enter it if you can believe that!