Blackberry Handhelds – Going Paperless

[EnergySaver]

I’m helping out another cacher with Paperless questions … he’s asking if you can do paperless caching with a Blackberry.

Anybody know the answer or tried it?
To be honest, I only know Palm products.
Is a Blackberry run on a PocketPC platform or a Palm platform, or is it out in it’s own world?

[rpaske]

Check out this link. It appears s though using Blackberry for paperless geocaching works – – – Kindof.
http://gpsokie.blogspot.com/2006/04/saturday.html

[EnergySaver]

I looked at that article … it doesn’t look all that promising to me, from those comments.
If any one else has comments or experience, speak up … thanks.

[Jeremy]

BlackBerries are really designed to work “online” or with a connection to the Internet. If you have a connection, you can always get cache information from the WAP or low-fi version of geocaching.com using the internal web browser:

http://wap.geocaching.com

I couldn’t find a decent offline HTML browser for the BlackBerry. If they had one, you could generate HTML cache pages from a PQ on your PC and load them into the device. (This would be sort of like the GSAK/Plucker or Spinner/Plucker combo for the Palm.) Then you wouldn’t need to have a connection to Internet.

This offline browser (Plusmo) will grab pages from the Internet for offline viewing on the BB. So I think you could make HTML pages from a PQ, put them on the web somewhere, and tell this application to fetch them… kind of a hack.

Another option would be to email the cache information to your BlackbBerry, maybe as an attachment? Remember this is what the BlackBerry is really designed to do… allow reading and responding to email on the go.

[EnergySaver]

From what I’m hearing … If I had a Blackberry, I’d feel compelled to still want a PalmPilot for caching (even if it was a cheap/ebay black and white unit), so that I could still use CacheMate … or get the Palm T/X, which has Wi-Fi

[Jeremy]

@EnergySaver wrote:

From what I’m hearing … If I had a Blackberry, I’d feel compelled to still want a PalmPilot for caching

I would agree with this Ron.

The only advantage of the BlackBerry is the ability to go online to get the absolute latest information for a cache or TB… but you can get this same functionality in a Palm device like the T|X (wi-fi) or Treo (cell).

[Author]

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