Pimp that BlackBerry

Inbox:Sometimes the BlackBerry, the weapon of choice for most executives these days, seems only good for e-mail, but it can do a lot more than that. So let's pimp your BlackBerry!

Get lost a lot? Try out Garmin Mobile, an application that delivers maps, directions and turn-by-turn navigation on BlackBerrys. You'll need the software and the Bluetooth wireless receiver that comes with it. There is a Garmin Mobile subscription involved, some synching with the BlackBerry and you're good to go. This will speak street names, offer moving maps, traffic and weather.

Telenav and Webraska also offer a similar services. If, however, you are not keen on carrying the extra device, it might be worth investing in a small GPS and avoiding the subscription fees.

Pocket Express is a bunch of services that run on a BlackBerry, known as an on- device portal (see handmark. com). This gives you breaking news, football results, weather, market indices and financial market news, travel and entertainment news, among a myriad of other services.

Want to show slides from your BlackBerry? Impatica Showmate (see Impatica.com) is a small, lightweight hardware accessory to project Power- Point presentations wirelessly from a hand-held device.

You attach the ShowMate to the VGA port of a projector and your BlackBerry delivers the presentation wirelessly over Bluetooth. The Impatica Viewer software (which works on BlackBerry as well as Sony Ericsson and Windows mobiles) converts your PowerPoint presentations for transfer to the mobile.

If you're looking to take voice notes on your BlackBerry, BigHand.com markets the Digital Dictation software for BlackBerry.

This allows users to record, edit and play back dictations on their BlackBerry smartphone and instantly upload them wirelessly into the BigHand service so they can be transcribed.

Both BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry Internet Service architectures are supported, if you have trouble convincing your IT manager.

Take a lot of pictures?

Normally, putting pictures on to your BlackBerry is a pain in the behind, so SplashPhoto for BlackBerry (see http:// Splashdata.com) allows you to drop images from wherever they are on your computer to the SplashPhoto Desktop application and sync to your BlackBerry.

Those days of having to use a photo editing program to crop and decrease the size of your photos then e-mailing them to yourself to get them on to your BlackBerry are over.

If you are a fan of instant messaging, you can get the recently updated Gtalk and Yahoo! chat clients for the BlackBerry (download over the air from http://mobile. blackBerry.com on your mobile browser).

BlackBerry users can also now get easy access to the popular social networking site Facebook, which has integrated the Facebook Web application with the BlackBerry. Now you can know when you have a new Facebook event (like a new wall post or message); view messages or wall posts, who's "poking" you, new photo tags and friend requests; you can see status updates and post photos direct from the mobile.

This is just a taster of the many applications available for the BlackBerry and it's always worth remembering that, because it can run Java, it can run most mobile phone applications on the market today.