Having given my Blackberry a thorough roadtesting over the last couple of weeks, here’s a few thoughts, particularly as far as GTD is concerned.
Overall, it’s nice to have a device where fast data entry is possible. The form factor isn’t perfect, but it’s an acceptable compromise and a big improvement on a pen-based system – thumbs might not be as accurate as all eight fingers, but they’re far more accurate than the alternative Graffitti-style character entry.
The main advantages as far as GTD are concerned are:
- you’re able to use the device in situations where pen and paper would be difficult
- the content is synched back to your corporate server, so changes to diaries etc are immediately updated
- the synching also acts as a backup, so this is instantaneous and seamless – you just forget that it’s happening, which is about as good as it can get as far as backup is concerned.
There are some downsides, however.
- the support for categories within the tasks application is pretty rudimentary – although there is a category field, you can’t sort the display, only filter. That displays a list of the tasks in a specified category, but it’s several clicks away from the main screen. However, there’s a hack for this, more of which later.
- similarly, the options for using categories in the other apps is fairly basic. This isn’t quite so problematic as it is with tasks, but if you make a lot of use of categories it might be a bit of a bind.
- the support for non-Windows ‘partner systems’ is pretty ropey – there’s a third-party sync app, but it’s very clear that this is a device aimed at Wintel-based corporates.
Overall
In general, I’m fairly impressed with the device, and I’ll probably be able to live with the limitations. It helps that for a proportion of the time I’m sat in front of a Windows laptop, so working in Outlook make things slightly easier (or at least as much as anything is easy with Outlook). I’m not sure that a Blackberry would be a complete replacement for a laptop, but it goes a long way towards being that perfect combination of PIM and device.
