Every once in a while I come across something so amazingly simple that I kick myself for not having discovered it before. It’s yet another reason I love the BlackBerry: after years of playing around with it and writing down my findings, there are still things to learn. This one is pretty basic, but totally practical. Some people like to write novellas when they send an email. Sometimes it’s annoying, but other times it’s necessary and you actually have to read through the thing. But what if you don’t want to do it in one sitting? That could mean scrolling through to the point you left off, which, depending on the length of the email, could be a pain. There’s a quick fix, though.
If you’re leaving the message screen to use another application, you can just hit the End button to exit the message to the Home Screen or Applications Menu (whichever you came from). When you’re ready to resume reading the email you can just click on Messages again and it will bring you right back to where you left off.
But what if you’re exiting the email to check on new messages? If you hit the Escape key you can go check the messages, but when you come back to the old one you’ll be right back at the top. The quick fix: hit any letter. No, seriously. Just hit any letter on your keyboard and your BlackBerry will go right back to the point of exit. No need to scroll through the whole message again. That should make life just a bit easier.
Update: It appears that “any key” might have been a bit hasty. Obviously, there are shortcut keys to consider. I just went through it again, using G. It works fine. Just go into a message, scroll a bit through, then hit the Escape key. When you go back to the message, hit the G key and you should go right back to where you left off. Just to make sure it’s not an OS/device thing, I’m on an 8330 with OS 4.5.0.77.
