The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

The battery is lasting much better today. Have disabled GPS, and 3G. Unplugged it from the charger at 6am. It is now 6pm and the battery has 60% left.

Bluetooth working well with my car kit.

Have the basics going on the phone. Getting my company email, calendar and contacts pushed via my company’s  Blackberry Enterprise Server. Only 3rd party apps installed thus far is the Gmail app and AstraSync. I use gmail for my personal emails, and unfortunately if your Blackberry is connected to a BES then you cannot also push gmail or any other mail service to your device’s native email client. This where the Gmail app comes in, as it syncs with your gmail account, not in the device’s native email client, but in the gmail app. This is great, except the gmail app displays only plain text format – no html links, no rich text format, no images. Not good enough. Every other major platform, with the exception of Symbian, provides html format emails from multiple email sources. The options on Blackberry to achieve this is thin on the ground. You could try Tiggit mail. I have. It is okish. Am now trying AstraSync which performs two-way over-the-air synchronization of email, calendar and contact data with Exchange ActiveSync compatible servers including Microsoft Exchange, MailSite Fusion, Exchange Online, BPOS, CommuniGate Pro, Zimbra, Scalix, FirstClass, Open-Xchange, Kerio MailServer, Google Sync and importantly for me,  with Gmail. Costs US$50 per year, which is not cheap compared to the gmail app which is free, but it does HTML.