AIM for the BlackBerry
Yahoo Messenger for the BlackBerry
GoogleTalk for the BlackBerry
Windows Live for the BlackBerry

About a week into getting the Bold (AT&T released the service books for AIM and Yahoo a bit later than usually, don’t ask me why), just about all chat clients now have support for the Bold, so with the included BlackBerry Messenger, the Bold has become the ultimate messaging phone. All are integrated very well and there is very little lag between sending and receiving messages.

Google Maps
Good thing that the Bold’s (a-)GPS isn’t locked down by AT&T and you can use any application that you want that uses GPS/a-GPS except for BlackBerry Maps, which AT&T decided to axe to include AT&T Navigator, which is $10 a month.

Gmail
With the Bold not supporting IMAP, there is only one way to sync Gmail with your Bold and is with the Gmail App by Google. Mind you it doesn’t support things such as labeling and I struggled to get it to auto suggest contacts and groups. There was also the issue of the updates not coming in real time, it seems that the Gmail App only checks sometimes, which is probably because it doesn’t want to be a real resource and network hog.

Facebook
Not great, but a decent way to view facebook on your BlackBerry other than using the subpar browser. You can only write messages to one person and not multiple people though, which is a real downside (note to facebook dev crew: implement a real mail and messaging system already, will ya).

FlyCast
Until Pandora/RIM (or an ambitious developer) codes up a Pandora app, this is probably the best alternative. Works decent, but it was hard to navigate seeing as the UI was just an emulation of the iPhone interface.

qik
Streaming video from your Bold to the interwebs, works well enough, but you don’t really know that it actually streamed online, but you can just go online later and check that it did and if it didn’t upload it later from your Bold.

Opera Mini
Great alternative to the built-in browser. It runs quicker, but it can’t run Javascript and it feels a bit slower than Opera Mini in the JVM of my old WinMo Tilt.

Mobipocket Reader
If you are a reading addict this is a great alternative to dedicated E-Book readers like the Sony Reader, Amazon Kindle or the iRex Illiad. I can’t say I can stare at the insanely bright screen for extended periods, but for those short trips to work on the subway where I don’t have any cell signal this holds me over pretty well.

Yahoo Go!
This is actually a very well done application by the Yahoo! team. It is very slick, supports Flickr where you can actually view photos, Yahoo Mail (not full HTML), news feeds (RSS) with full image support, weather, stocks, maps and directions which make use of the GPS. One complaint is that it is a tad slow sometimes. When I attempted to add the feed for Engadget, it took a few minutes for it to add to my news feeds.

TwitterBerry
For all you twitter fanatics, works extremely well and only updates when you want to unless of course you have it open, which it will update whenever one of the people you are following updates.

Newgator Go!
Probably my favorite application for the BlackBerry, one that I like so much that it is in my top five row. I am pretty much addicted to RSS and this is by far the best RSS application for the BlackBerry. The only downside is that it doesn’t support images, but it makes up for it in strides with the ability to clip articles, quickness and the ability to sync with your own news feeds on newsgator, where if you have multiple devices or are using the desktop applications FeedDemon or NetNewsWire you can customize what news feeds it updates.

• Go Back in Time with Gmail, have you ever wanted to write that email dated a week ago, well with Gmail you can do just that.
• Downloadsquad equates Apple to LSD.
• Here is another from the guys and gals over at Cerulean taking some time off coding the next Trillian, which has been amazing so far.
• Quite possibly one of my favorite, just go to Youtube and click on any of the top videos.
• Woot has another “Wootoff”, if you were a bit impulsive, enjoy your batteries.
• For all you Blizzard fans, check out the Tauran Marine. How about the new Bard Class in WoW, which Rocks out a la Guitar Hero style to destroy its enemies.
• The most elaborate one yet.
• Richard Dawkins would be Happy to see this.
• I don’t think this is an April Fool’s joke, but it is hilarious.
• Another non-April Fool’s prank, but it’s Engadget sticking it to Deutsche TeleKom for this ridiculous claim to the color of magenta, that’s #ed008c, for all you HTML nerds.
• Here are two really good round ups from 1UP and another from Joystiq.

First off chatting. Are those ads getting to you when using Yahoo, AIM, or Windows Live Messenger? Well you weren’t the only one. Four years ago, while using the AIM client provided by the wonderful people at AOL left this distaste in my mouth. It was crude, video ads would start to randomly play at the most inopportune moments and it came with the option of installing it’s own spyware, WeatherBug. I decided to search for other applications that would replace it, a few years later I stumbled upon Meebo. I scoffed at the mention that a web application that could replace and be more robust than a desktop equivalent, but I gave it a whirl anyway (at the time I was using Trillian and GAIM, unsatisfied with both). At first glance I was quite surprised at how nice the interface was. It was simple and clean and it left you to decide which service you wanted to log into, AIM, Yahoo, MSN and ICQ (I believe GTalk support was added later) and the part was that it worked without the need to install any applications on the browser, since it is DHTML based. Meebo appeared on the early days of the AJAX rage, so unlike other web chatting applications like yahoo’s webmessenger or aimexpress that need you to install a plugin to work, meebo works out of the box, no plugin needed. Best of all, since it was built off the same libraries created by the GAIM (now known as Pidgin) crew, it emulates the desktop experience of GAIM. However, meebo has recently partnered up with AOL, so it could mean many things both good and bad, but that is a discussion left for an entirely different post. So, yeah meebo is awesome, give it a whirl if you don’t believe me. To get full functionality of all of meebo’s features you need to create an account which is relatively painless and won’t take you more than a few minutes.

Next up email. Outlook is arguably the best email client there is, with Thunderbird coming in at a very close second, so while investigating which web email app could replace Outlook or Thunderbird left me extremely skeptical, but I was up for a challenge. So here are my findings. It was a close race between two very great clients, but Gmail came out on top of Yahoo!’s email service. Particularly because of its zippiness and ease of use. Both services offer very similar functionalities, both can recieve mail from other account (POP only), both can write email that appears as like it is from another account, both have chatting capabilites, and both has its upsides and downsides, but the one I ultimately use and like more is Gmail.

The key differences between Gmail and Yahoo! Mail:

• Gmail supports tagging as opposed to Yahoo’s folder’s
• Gmail’s chatting supports both AIM and GTalk, Yahoo’s is only Yahoo
• I find that Gmail’s spam filter is much better than Yahoo’s, but Yahoo’s seem to be improving over time
• Yahoo has tab support ala Firefox, a feature that Gmail sorely lacks
• Gmail has less obtrusive, but arguably privacy invading context relevant ads
• Yahoo’s interface is much nicer than Gmail’s

Overall I liked both services, but Gmail is something I just can’t live without. Yahoo’s UI feels more desktopy than Gmail’s but Gmail’s has a tad more functionality and its zippierness won me over. I have had problems with Yahoo’s new interface at times, but had very little trouble with Gmail’s other than the occassional problem loading, which was impart to my crappy DSL connection.

News Reader, RSS Reader,
This was a complete tie between Google Reader and Bloglines. Both are pretty awesome, the only reason why I use Google Reader over Bloglines is because of its stat tracking and ability to share and star items. I like Bloglines interface and media rendering much better than Google Reader’s, but the sharing and stat tracking is unparalleled. For those who don’t know what RSS is, it stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a stream of news that is automatically updated using XML, so instead of going onto say Engadget to read up on new gadgets, just enter the RSS feed address into the news reader and it will aggregate all the posts for you. It is a pretty awesome technology, essentially cut the amount of time I browse the interwebs by half. The only downside is the loss of random discovery that you get from browsing the interwebs or using a service like StumbleUpon. For more a more technical overview of RSS go here: RSS Wikipedia Page, RSS Spec on XML.com and here.

This concludes part one of this series. Stay tuned for part two of this series