Maureen Azuhwrites on how you can explore certain functions of your BlackBerry smartphone for special usesBlackBerry smartphone was developed by a Canadian company, Research in Motion in 1999 to function as personal digital assistant, portable media player, Internet browser and gaming device. The smartphone is popularly known for its ability to send and receive e-mails and instant messages.But beyond these known functions, BlackBerry has a whole lot of free applications which most people are not aware of. While some are well known and already in use, others are not known. But the interesting thing about these applications is that most of them are free and downloadable too.Pandora Mobile is one of the already popular appsas they are called sometimesthat allows a BlackBerry user to do almost everything that can be done on a desktop. With this application, one can create music stations; listen to already created ones, rate songs and bookmark artists and their songs.With the chaotic traffic and untidy parking lots that have become a common sight in many urban cities, Neosistec CarFinder will help BlackBerry users locate their carno matter how crowded the parking lot might be. According to makeuseof.com, when someone leaves a car parked somewhere, all he needs to do is to open CarFinders simple menu and mark its location through the BlackBerrys GPS. When the need to find the car - or another specific point - arises, they simply pull up CarFinder and it will guide them back via a compass or the Blackberry Maps applicationat least for those who can read maps. A user can also send his marked location to a friend.More on maps, BlackBerry smartphone also offers the popular maps site, Google Maps, which allows for most of the features on the site to run on the phone, like what obtains with a desktop. The site makes it possible for a user to get road and street directions, maps in satellite view, watch trafficwhich is unpredictable, anyway - and see ones location. Interestingly, this application works even without a GPS on the BlackBerry, but of course works better if it does have one.For those who cannot do without pinging and instant messaging, Palringo will come in handy. It is a mobile instant messaging client which supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo and Google Talk in one piece of software. It can also be used to chat with other users of Palringo on a desktop, Android, iPhone/iPod Touch, Windows Mobile or Symbian phone via text chat, voice or pictures.According to some of the reviews done on the software, Palringos voice capabilities make it a great almost push-to-talk or PTT software and a good piece of software to talk with friends online or on their mobile phones due to its wide compatibility.BlackBerry also offers an application called Qik Mobile, which allows a user to stream live video from the phone to the internet for free. With it, one can stream video online from the device for anyone to see, or limit access with a password. Although it comes with a caveat; the Blackberry must be a model with a camera for Qik to work.And there are some of the very popular applications that are already well knowninfact that is about all some BlackBerry users know about their device. These are Facebook for Blackberry and Twitterberry, for the social networking freaks.However, these applications are not limited to entertainment alone. There are some that are made for those whose work thrive on research. Boopsie for instance, lets a user effortlessly search for content or articles on sites like IMDB, Wikipedia and Amazon. When an individual uses the application, he can pull up his favourite channel and then search for content on it and live results will appear on the devices screen for the selected content.Like Boopsie, Viigo is equally a feature-rich application which lets a user view news and RSSalso known as Really Simple Syndication, is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works, such as blog entries and news headlines in a standardised format or summarised text. It equally enables users to view audio clips, podcasts, stocks and money data, and weather. From this application, one can browse many blog RSS feeds, see sports scores, view local weather and even read books.The Blackberry Appworld, made directly by Blackberry, is also user-friendly, as it allows a user to browse through a wide variety of many other Blackberry applications, download and install them on the spot from the application. There are also contributions from lots of different developers who make their applications available to the library for download. The only limitation to this particular application is that a user must have a free PayPal account in order to get through checkout of some of the applications that may not be free.As technology evolves, so are the inventions and this applies to many of these applications. It is therefore necessary to occasionally look out for anything new as well as updating the existing ones when new versions are introduced.
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