Hi! I’m Jay Goldman and welcome to the Blackberry tips and tricks series. Today we’re going to be looking at some Blackberry basics with a Blackberry 8800 which includes the roller ball technology that first appeared on the Pearl and now also available on the Blackberry Bold and Javelin lines.
The alternative to that as a Blackberry Storm with the touch screen and we’ll be showing you some Blackberry tips related to that in an upcoming episode. One of the first things to know is, obviously the roller ball which allows you to navigate menus up and down, as well as side to side. You can also use it for moving the insertion point when you’re typing on the Blackberry and so, it’s really quick to move around the screen and find what you’re looking for.
The other important thing to notice and we’ll come back to this is the Blackberry menu button which is immediately to the left of the roller ball and allows access to menus and virtually all the applications. Below that is a full QWERTY keyboard which is one of Blackberry’s specialties and in this case, very easy to type on and on the side of the device, we find things like a USB port for charging and syncing, headphone jack, obviously, for headphones and a convenience key which can be programmed to do different things.
On this side of the device, volume UP and DOWN buttons. Navigating, as I mentioned, is as simple as rolling the ball and in this case, we’re on the home screen so we see some of the options that are available here. You can also select applications at the bottom, and view the full screen of applications. Selecting an item, involves clicking the button in the middle of the roller ball. In this case, it will take us into the address book and once we’re in there, the menu button will open a menu of options that are related to the application we’re in.
So in this case, a number of options related to addresses. I can create new ones. I can email my self, and I can set options for the address book application. Using the return key, it takes you out of menus and right back to the home screen. The home screen itself can be customized on all Blackberries by opening the menu item and then choosing for example, move icon which allows me to reorder applications so that the ones I use most often can be at the top.
If I have applications that I don’t use on a regular basis, for example, I might not be a big Brick Breaker fan; I can open the menu and choose to hide the icon which will grey it out. If I open the menu again and turn off the SHOW ALL mode, all of the icons that I have hidden will disappear, and I can easily get them back by opening it again and choosing SHOW ALL.
That’s Blackberry basics. I’m Jay Goldman. Thanks for watching. Stay tuned for more.
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