The 8830: Multimedia and Tethering

Week 2 into being a Blackberry user and I am still very happy with the device. Two major things I have tested since the last post are using the device for multimedia and tethering it to my computer to use it as a modem.

Multimedia

One thing to note about the 8830 is you need a microSD card to add music, video, mp3 ring tones and photos to it. This I feel is a pretty good precaution to protect the on board memory, which is 64MB, and should be reserved for applications and the OS. I was able to buy a microSD extremely cheap on Amazon. Once that came, I went right to work. After figuring out the media manager program for the Blackberry, I loaded my old ring tone onto it, an album and a number of 7 megapixel photos (1 or 2 MB each). The music player is a pretty nice program and playing music in the background doesn’t really slow the device down (not to the point where it’s frustrating anyway). The pictures, however, did take a long time to render on the device, though working with smaller images was much faster. If you shrink photos you want on the device down, there is no problem there either. As far as battery life while using the media player, that is something you need to look out for. It does not drain extremely fast, but faster than normal. My philosophy on the matter is while it’s nice to have both combined, I’d still keep phone and mp3 player as separate devices.

Tethering

One feature I was really excited about was using my Blackberry as a modem. This is something you do have to pay extra for through Verizon, and I figured at $15/month, I’d give it a shot for one month (we don’t have cable set up in the new house at school yet either, so it’s applicable). After activating it on my account, and installing the VZAccess software, connecting was as easy as connecting the blackberry to the computer. VZAccess automatically connects to the internet.

Now of course this won’t be as fast as say cable, but it wasn’t as slow as I thought it would be. I was able to visit most websites I normal visit with little lag, and I was able to ftp (though that took longer than I would have liked). I’m not so sure I’d enjoy do work over this connection because of the longer load times and ftp times, but it’s nice to know I’d be able to if I had to.

My over all experience with the two functions were good ones, and two more reasons the 8830 is worth the buy, and much better than my Treo. My friend just picked up an 8830 also, so I will probably be doing a write up on Blackberry to Blackberry communication, including using Blackberry Messenger.