As a Blackberry fan, I hope we do get to see some of the things they’re promising in the near future.
Tasty Blackberries coming?
July 3rd, 2006
As a Blackberry fan, I hope we do get to see some of the things they’re promising in the near future.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
The Nokia E61 does all of this already:
http://www.nokia.co.uk/nokia/0,8764,84093,00.html
(runs Blackberry Connect, WiFi, EDGE, nice screen and keyboard, and you can install your own applications on it). About 300 UKP inc VAT. It will be interesting to see if Crackberry users maintain their loyalty in the longer-term. I’m very tempted to get one of these, although as a non-business user, the lack of a camera is a minus. I might get the E70 instead. (Of course, I might be slightly biased, working for Symbian, which is the OS inside these phones/computers).
Do Blackberries render email messages in a monospaced font, as God intended?
Ah, an interesting question, Andrew, and one which made me go and look at mine more carefully. It doesn’t look as if any of the fonts on my 7100t are monospaced, but it may be possible to install extra ones.
Also, while I understand the desire for them in general, on small devices, especially the BBs in a phone-type format, the amount of text you could get on the screen would be drastically reduced if they weren’t proportional. I’m not often concerned, on my BB, about the layoit of large tables, source code etc because there aren’t enough pixels across the screen anyway. The more traditional-style ‘wide’ Blackberries may be different…
I scoured the web, and I have so far found no evidence that it is possible to supplement the abysmal collection of fonts found pre-installed on the Blackberry 8700 series. All of the fonts are blocky, inconsistent, and quite terrible for displaying email (particularly email containing code or aligned text). This is the twentieth century… why is it so difficult to get something clean like Bitstream Vera Sans Mono (or better yet, that lovely 6×10 font suitable for xterms, heck, I’d settle for Microsoft Courier New) onto this thing?