Is there a PDA with Blackberry e-mail?

L

LDFerguson

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Been thinking about getting a new Blackberry phone, as I like the e-mail push. Was also considering a PDA that can run the mini-Windows or whatever it's called - MS IE, Word and Excel are my main requirements.

Two questions -

(1) is there any device out there that combines all three - phone, Blackberry and also simple IE, Excel and Word?
(2) On your average PDA with mini-Windows, will it run MS Excel spreadhseets that I transfer off my office PC?

Thanks,

Liam
 
By mini-Windows you probably mean (which, confusingly, was called a whole host of other things in the past). Such PDAs do run cut down versions of Office applications but I'm not sure if they ship as standard or have to be purchased separately. For what it's worth a colleague of mine swears by his recently acquired iPaq but it's not a Blackberry or a phone.
 
Yeah it's Windows Mobile - can I run spreadsheets created on Windows Immobile (like XP or whatever) on this?
 
The o2 XDA II is a PPC2003-based PDA with support for Blackberry. I haven't tried it but I believe your email provider has to have some kind of Blackberry extension too.
 
LDFerguson said:
Yeah it's Windows Mobile - can I run spreadsheets created on Windows Immobile (like XP or whatever) on this?
Click to expand...
Windows Immobile - I like it! Yes - you can transfer fully fledged Office documents from the desktop to a Windows Mobile PDA running whatever the cut-down version of Office is called (Office Mobile?). It's all pretty seamless. Obviously you have less screen "real estate" to work with but you have most or all of the normal capabilities.
 
Actually it's . See for more on "Pocket" versions of common productivity applications. No Pocket Billiards though. And see here for one review of the sort of capabilities supported by Windows Mobile in a strange sort of garbled English!
 
LDFerguson said:
Yeah it's Windows Mobile - can I run spreadsheets created on Windows Immobile (like XP or whatever) on this?
Click to expand...

haha i like that... windows immobile
 
taking this back a step, what exactly is a PDA???

I gather a Blackberry is a smallish device, a kind of cross between phone & laptop that basically gives you e-mail on the move ... am I right so far.

So is a PDA one of those oversized phones, by Nokia???, that open up and have a mini keyboard - also transmitting e-mail (are these necessarily 3G or is it just better if they are??).

So on which device (or both) would you get Windows mobile or Pocket Word & Excel etc??

Soon to buy an i-Book, an Apple laptop, mainly for video editing etc. but I believe it has a version of Microsoft Office that works.
 
I did a bit of research into this recently having just bought a Nokia 9500.

Here's some of my research if it's of use to you, Betsy Og...

  • Blackberry e-mail is a system whereby your e-mails are "pushed" out to your phone immediately on arrival, rather than you having to connect and check to see if you have e-mail.
  • Blackberry themselves make phones with Blackberry e-mail, but they also have licenced their Blackberry "push" e-mail system out to other product manufacturers.
  • I tried to find a device that would combine Blackberry e-mail, a phone and MS Windows Mobile, with a real keyboard. I could be wrong, but I don't think such a device exists.
  • The XDA device has MS Windows Mobile and a phone, but I didn't like it because it has a touch-screen rather than a keyboard, but that's personal taste.
  • The Nokia 9500 has a fold out "real" keyboard, although it's a bit small and fiddly. It's not a 3G phone. It does have 802.11 wireless connectivity so you can connect to the internet via a hotspot if available or via a wireless LAN if you have one. It doesn't have Blackberry e-mail so you have to connect and check for e-mails. It does have a word processor, presentation maker/viewer and spreadsheet applications. They're not Microsoft products, they're Symbian software. But they will open MS Word, Excel or Power Point files. There are some formatting issues so it would be difficult for you to do "round-trip" work with MS applications, i.e. someone sends you an Excel spreadsheet, you change it on your Nokia and e-mail it back to them. There would be formatting problems doing that.
Hope this helps.

Liam
 
True, but then you'd have two items to carry around instead of one, and I'd feel like a muppet sitting on a bus folding out my XDA keyboard.
 
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