Me want!

I am one well-dressed man today

I want one of these for myself now…a BlackBerry 8700. Since I don’t have a laptop this would come in handy when I’m traveling, not that I do that very often. The Treo 700 has additional capabilities like camera phone (already got one), music player (Ipod solves that) and movie viewer (okay, score one for Treo).

This one is the 8700c which only Cingular offers. I’d rather have the 8700g because it also lets you do Yahoo/AIM instant messaging, but cell coverage is very sketchy where I live so I’m not sure the carriers that offer it will work for me.

Getting attachment viewing working was a bear though. The included attachment viewer only works if you use the $1500 BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) which also requires an SQL server and there was no way I was installing all that noise for two BlackBerries. I ended up eating those words later with nothing to wash it down.

First I tried a 3rd party utility called Repligo. Essentially whenever you open an attachment it gets forwarded to the Repligo servers which then send it back as a picture which you can view easily. This was going to cost $99 per year for each person that used the device - potentially $500-600 in annually recurring costs.

Thankfully someone on Experts-Exchange mentioned there was a free Express version of BES 4.1. I was able to install that along with MS Desktop Engine (MSDE) on my spare machine in short order. I did have to increase the RAM since all these extra processes are real resource hogs. BES Express comes with one free license so we just have to purchase one extra for a one-time fee of $99 and we’re home free. Nothing like saving the boss a few pennies especially with my annual review coming in a few months.

I look damn good today.