Favorite Blackberry Tips

This is my not-so-comprehensive list of Blackberry Hacks and Shortcuts, gained through experience and trolling through other people’s lists of hacks and shortcuts, plus my personal experience with Blackberry 7230 and 7105 units. These shortcuts and hacks will work for virtually any 7100 series Blackberry, and many will work for other models as well. I will continue to update this posting as I discover new and interesting things.

Keyboard Shortcuts
One of the most useful yet least used Blackberry productivity enhancers are the plethora of keyboard shortcuts. While most of these are actually documented, few people actually take the time to RTFM (myself included). These are my favorites:

Home Screen
From the home screen, the following keys are really useful:

• Lock the phone: press and hold the ‘*’


• Unlock the phone: / double-click the click wheel


• Turn vibrate mode on/off quickly: Press and hold ‘#’


• Move or hide an icon on the screen: Press Alt and click the wheel; select hide or move and click


• (Note: I haven’t figured out how to move icons from one of the sub-menus to the home menu, and vice versa (yet))


• Unhide icons: Alt plus wheel click; select ‘Unhide’


• Return to home screen: press [End Call] button


• Switch applications: press and hold alt key + press escape button


• Note: this is really useful during phone calls or while you wait for a slow web page to load


• Show Blackberry event log: Alt-L Alt-G Alt-L Alt-G (press [Enter] on log entries for more info)


• Change signal strength to number: Alt-B-B-M-L-L (note: larger numbers indicate worse signal; 40 is perfect, 120 is worst, and > 100 you’ll notice signal problems)

Message Screen
While reading messages, the following shortcuts come in really handy:

• Delete multiple messages (two ways):
• To delete all messages prior to a certain date, move the cursor until it's on the date bar (e.g. 'Mon Jan 9, 2006') and select 'Delete Prior' from the menu. This will delete all messages from the selected date and prior.
• To delete multiple messages from the inbox, hold down the alt key and roll the wheel; select the messages you wish to delete and press the [del] key.
  
• Move to top/bottom of screen: 1 / 7


• Page up(screen up)/page down(screen up): [3] / [9]


• Compose new message from inbox: [L]


• Forward a message from inbox: [OP]


• Reply to sender: [QW]


• Reply all: [AS]


• Show phone log: Alt-P (press ESC to return)


• View voice messages: press and hold Alt-[CV]

Calendar

• Go to next day, week, month: [space]


• Previous day, week, month: [#]


• Create new appointment: [.]

Typing

• Switch between SureType and multi-tap input: hold ‘*’ until indicator changes (upper right corner of screen)


• Capitalize a letter: press and hold the key


• NUM lock: # + alt (press alt to turn off)


• Insert a period: press [space] twice

Phone

• Open phone application: press [Send] (green phone)


• Voicemail: press and hold [1] key


• Redial: press [Send] key twice


• Mute: [!] (toggle)


• Speakerphone: [.] (toggle)


• Switch to Bluetooth headset: click wheel and select ‘Enable’ for the device


• Assign speed dial: press and hold number key; follow menus


• Dial speed dial: press and hold assigned number key

Bluetooth Tips

Blackberries that have bluetooth exhibit one very annoying characteristic when used with a wireless headset: when you press the button on the headset, it automatically re-dials the last person you called (not what most people intend, especially when the headset is in a purse or pocket!). The workaround is as follows:

• From the home screen, select Settings...Options...Bluetooth
• Click the wheel and select Options
• Select 'Allow outgoing calls' and change to 'Never' or 'If unlocked' (the latter will allow auto-redial only if the unit is unlocked, which still won't totally prevent the problem). I suggest you select 'Never' to be absolutely sure your BB doesn't make crank phone calls.

Using your PC headset with the Blackberry

I discovered another interesting Bluetooth feature last night: if you pair your Blackberry (well, the 7105 anyway) with your PC (assuming you have a Bluetooth adapter in your PC), you can take advance of the 'Audio Gateway' profile. What this means is that you can establish a connection between your Blackberry and the PC, and when you activate the Audio Gateway profile (usually found under Bluetooth services), the Blackberry will then use the PC as its headset. In my case, since I have a high-quality USB headset on my PC, it means that I can use my PC headset when people call my cell--very useful when working from home or in an instance where I'm going to be on the phone for a long time (PC headsets are generally more comfortable than the standard Bluetooth headset). Not for everyone, but kind of fun nonetheless.

Now if I could just figure out how to get the Blackberry Desktop software to recognize my PC Bluetooth adapter, so I could sync wirelessly.....