Blackberry Program Ideas

Last December I took the plunge and decided to get myself a Blackberry Pearl. Being a programmer, the first thing I did the minute I got it was to look up the Blackberry SDK. You see, I bought the Pearl without a data plan, and wanted to create a program that allowed me to sync my email onto the phone. While receiving email in real time was not important to me, I did have a phone that was built to use email, I should be able to take it along with me.


I set out to write a program that would take my Gmail and put it into a CSV. Then upload the CSV into Outlook Notes. Then sync the notes to the phone. This sounded good, but in the end it wouldn't seem to work well. Somewhere in the middle I changed my direction. I decided to write the emails to text files, because it is actually not that difficult to read text files from the media browser. However, It would take quite a while to scroll through the list, even using the blackberry scroll tips.

Then I wrote an application for the blackberry that would read these and display them on the phone in a similar way to how the blackberr messaging works. I got it all done, and it worked great on the simulator, but as soon as I moved it to the phone, I discovered that it will not run until RIM signs the app. For 100 dollars. So scrathch that.

I finally discovered the simple and easy way to do it. Tell gmail to forward my emails as MMS messages. Granted, this requires unlimited MMS, but I have that, and it is a lot less expensive than the data plan.

My next idea is to create a text based internet browser for use through MMS. Anyone interested in this? would you use it?

Basically it would be a port of the Lynx Browser. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29

I would like to do this, I dont know if anyone would be interested in it. If so let me know, I would gladly make this open source, if I can get it to work right.