sarahintampa

To begin with, the Google Calendar service has just released an interesting update - now users of Google Calendar can sync their calendar with their Blackberry mobile phones. Using a new application called Google Sync, you can see your appointments and daily schedule in your Blackberry’s native calendar, even when you don’t have any network coverage. You can be alerted to upcoming appointments with sound or vibration as you choose, and you can add appointments on your Blackberry and have them sync back to your Google online calendar. You can get Google Sync by pointing your Blackberry phone’s browser to http://m.google.com/sync.

Google also released a suite of mobile applications for Blackberry phones, which can be accessed by downloading the Google Mobile Updater application. The Mobile Updater app lets you get the latest Google mobile apps, including Google Maps for Mobile with My Location, Picasa Web Albums, Google Docs, Gmail, News, as well as the Mobile Updater app itself, which makes sure all the Google apps stay up-to-date. You can download the suite to your Blackberry by going to mobile.google.com from your phone. You can either pick and choose which applications you want to install, or you can download them all. Although the Mobile Updater adds new shortcuts to your Blackberry’s desktop, some icons, like Google Docs and Picasa, are just links to a mobile webpage, where you can sign into the Google service you want. The links on this mobile webpage include links to services not included in this “Mobile Google Pack,” like Calendar, SMS, Goog-411, Reader, Blogger, and Notebook.

Since I already use Gmail and Google Maps, a suite like this that adds more value with additional apps and keeps them up-to-date for me is a really useful service. I only wish that the suite had included a “real” mobile version of Google Reader. Reading feeds using a mobile browser is not the best experience. Until something better comes along, I’m sticking with Newsclip, a handy mobile feed reader I downloaded ages ago. I don’t know what happened to it, but, by the looks of it, it got rebranded as Viigo for Blackberry. At least it’s still free.

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