Blackberry Tip #1 - Search all your mails from blackberry, instantly!

This article is written out of years of frustration with Microsoft Outlook. Even now, running the latest Outlook on Windows 7 is still a painfully crawling and slow process, probably because the gigabytes of pst outlook storage. Against advice to archive and shrink existing active pst Outlook file to megabytes, all mails are kept so one could continue to search and read through for references. Also important to keep them active for desktop search such as Google Desktop. Although moving all .pst online means that one could search all on gmail, the preference may still be to search locally so that one could reply or forward using the original e-mail if needed.

However, what if you are on the move with only your Blackberry (or iPhone), and you need to find a particular important e-mail from 3 years ago? This is where the power of Gmail + mobile devices come in! All you need to do, is to point your blackberry browser to www.gmail.com, and gmail should recognise your blackberry device and provide a simple to use interface that looks something like this:



After you logged in, you can search for whatever you need through the search page. However, this web-based approach is still slow compared to downloading a dedicated mobile gmail application, from here. Then, with just one click, you can log into gmail effortlessly, and use the Option button to bring up the search prompt. Instead of a slightly awkward and flimsy mobile web interface, it will be a much more solid, dedicated blackberry app that looks a bit like this:



If you leave this gmail blackberry app running in the background, it will also alert you of any new e-mail messages (though you can also use your blackberry service to automatically retrieve your gmail messages!). However, being able to search *gigabytes* of years and years of your e-mails with such simple application really saves lives (a few times to be precise)!