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The Fourth of July has always been a time when friends and family get together to celebrate the birth of America. This year, we got lucky, as it was on a Friday, affording many of us a three day weekend. This meant the opportunity to attend a number of gatherings and catch up with those whom we haven’t seen in ages. Your trusty editor spent the first part of the weekend with old chums from the high school days. After the standard reminiscing, we wound up comparing, of all things, our cell phones. This made me and my tricked out BlackBerry the center of attention. Yes, sometimes being a geek does pay off.

The key to being impressive, of course, is to not act like you’re trying to be impressive. I knew that the content of my BlackBerry would blow my friends, cell phone lay people, away. However, I had to wait for the right moment to strike, lest I be called a hot dog. And trust me, the Fourth of July is for eating hot dogs, not being one.

Settling the argument

Like many groups of guys, our conversations centered around sports. We’d talk about our favorite teams and how they were doing during the season. This led to a number of debates about the quality of Player X, or the long-term future of Player Y. This opened up an opportunity to use my first cool feature: the Wikipedia BlackBerry application.

The question: Who did the Chicago White Sox trade to the Arizona Diamondbacks for All-Star left fielder Carlos Quentin? No one could think of the player, since he was a minor leaguer, and the deal flew under the radar this past winter. So I fired up the application, typed in his name, and away we went. The answer was Chris Carter, which made sense, since no one knew who he was.

This only opened the floodgates. When I did the Wikipedia quick launch, my friends also noticed that I have the Yankees widget from MLB.com. One of my friends, also equipped with an 8830, quickly downloaded his own widget. They absolutely loved all of the features provided by this mobile site, though that has more to do with MLB.com’s interface than the BlackBerry widget.

Killer theme

As the crew glanced at my BlackBerry screen, they noticed that my theme was unlike any they’d seen. While it might be standard for a geek, the Today Plus theme was new to them.

“So wait,” said one, whom we’ll call SB. “Your newest messages and calendar are displayed right on your main screen?”

“Yep,” I replied.

“And you can just click over to see your top five applications?” asked DG.

“Right-o,” I said.

“And you can still access the full menu, which isn’t cluttered with the individual mailbox icons?” asked KP.

“Why, yes sir. That’s actually one of my favorite features of the Today Plus theme. I only use the assimilated message function, so the individual mailbox icons are just a waste for me.”

“Me, too,” said KP.

I’ve been known to change my theme every couple of months, but it looks like Today Plus is here to stay. Honestly, I’ve never seen such a positive reaction to something as simple as a BlackBerry theme. They were also geeked to see our list of free BlackBerry themes.

Visual voicemail

“Hey, remember the message you left me yesterday?” I asked DG.

“Sorta,” he replied.

I clicked to the main menu, where I launched SimulSays. Yes, I know I ranked GotVoice the top transcription service, but the SimulSays application is easily the best for visual voicemail demonstration. From there, I started to read his message back to him.

“What?” he said. “Let me see that.” And so I took him through the SimlSays main screen, which lists your voicemails in order of receipt. Then I clicked through and showed him the transcription which I had read to him. Even more impressive was the ability to hit the play button and actually hear the message. “Dude, this thing does everything!” he said.

Keeping up with the news

At this point I was on a roll. Without being prompted, I launched Pocket Express. My friends played around with this for a while, finding the services pretty neat. Seeing as we were seeing some cloud cover, they checked the weather, which predicted a rainy night at the boardwalk. They wanted to try MobileCierge, but I figured that abusing the system wasn’t the best way to thank Handmark for setting me up with a review copy of their service.

This actually didn’t go over as well as I had hoped. So I pulled out another stop: The BBGeeks co-branded Viigo reader.

“Hey, isn’t that the site you write for?” asked SB. Yes, yes it is. They thought this was pretty cool. The few of them that are familiar with RSS really enjoyed the ease of using Viigo. But I couldn’t let it stop there. So I stepped aside for a few minutes and re-downloaded Viigo Tango beta, and brought it back to them. At this they were even more impressed.

“So why doesn’t this one say BBGeeks.com?” I was asked.

“Beta build. I’m sure we’ll work something out once it goes public later this summer.”

They played with this for a while, and I sat back, knowing that I was about to play my ace in the hole.

Voice controlled BlackBerry

“Where’s Brian?” one of my friends asked. “He was supposed to be here an hour ago, and I’m starving.”

“Someone call or text him,” said another. I announced that I’d take care of it. So I clicked down the Vlingo key on my BlackBerry and said, “Send message to Brian. Message where the hell are you?”

“What was that?” asked KP.

“This application called vlingo,” I told him. “I just use the side key on my BlackBerry, and I can basically control it with my voice.” So I ran a few demos to show the note to self, memo, and task functions. KP, who also has an 8830, loved the voice dialing feature, which is far superior to the native BlackBerry one. Within a minute or so of checking it out on my device, he was busy downloading his own copy.

Even my friends who had other PDAs like the Palm Centro or the Samsung i760 wanted Vlingo. Unfortunately, they aren’t supported yet. But that just means that they’re going to want it that much more when Vlingo does become available on a wider basis. Either that, or they can just go get a BlackBerry.

SB had the best comment after I showed him Vlingo. “So wait. You speak into your BlackBerry when you would normally type, and you read messages that you would normally listen to?”

“Yep,” I said.

“So does that mean that we’re all using our phones backwards?” It is an interesting point to consider. If these applications work as well or better than native systems, what does that say about the native systems?

Creating your own tricked out BlackBerry

Just because I wowed my friends with visual voicemail and a voice-controlled BlackBerry doesn’t mean that those are the only things you can use to impress your friends. There are thousands and thousands of nifty BlackBerry applications which you can use not only for your own productivity, but to show off to your friends. If they’re anything like my buddies, you’ll knock their socks off. If they’re fellow BlackBerry geeks, though, they might just end up showing you their own impressive set of applications and functions.

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