One of my major issues when looking at a Blackberry was the integration with Gmail.  From what I’d read, it worked, but I was still a bit leery of the push e-mail feature and potential delays.

My fears were unfounded.  I couldn’t ask for a smoother Blackberry/Gmail integration experience.  If you’re not familiar with the Blackberry, the term “push” e-mail describes the fact that the e-mail is pushed to the device by a server over-the-air, rather than having the device go poll for new mail at some interval using POP.  Setting up Gmail for the Blackberry is darned simple”

1. Log onto the Blackberry Internet Server (BIS) control panel through your provider (in my case, T-Mobile).
2. Choose the Add an Account option.
3. Put in your Gmail e-mail address and password.
4. There is no step 4.

That’s it.  Your Gmail messages will now be sent directly to your Blackberry.  Very quickly.  I usually have Gmail open in a tab in Firefox when I’m at my desk, and what I’ve seen is that the messages arrive on my Blackberry before they show up on the web.  I’d say that’s seamless.

[tags]blackberry, gmail[/tags]

Last night I became a Blackberry user.  I’m excited about the communication options this will give me at times when I’ve previously been unconnected.

I now have a Blackberry 8700g with service through T-Mobile.

Here are my thoughts on the first few hours:

• I was very impressed with the purchase experience.  Total time in the store was probably only 20 minutes since I knew what I wanted and the sales representative didn’t waste my time.
• Activation was perfect.  Voice was active before I walked out of the store, and data was active by the time I got home and plugged it in.  I was told that data activation could take up to 24 hours, but my experience was closer to 24 minutes.
• Setting up push e-mail through my Gmail account was very easy.
• I haven’t yet figured out a good way to get the thing out of the belt holster without accidentally pushing at least one button.
• I wish that the mobile version of Google Reader would automatically mark things as read without me having to explicitly do it for every 10 items.
• I currently use a Palm for most of my PIM functions; this weekend I’ll be moving contacts and schedules to the Blackberry and will blog about how that goes.  I know I’m in for some challenges… why?  We use Google Calendar for our home calendar.

[tags]blackberry, t-mobile, 8700g[/tags]