The Wall Street Journal-20080128-Mobility- On the Road
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Mobility; On the Road
Full Text (890 words)Making Your BlackBerry Sing
Your BlackBerry may be good for a lot more than just feeding your email addiction.
Unbeknown to many of their owners, BlackBerrys, starting with the Pearl, Curve and 8800 models of the past few years, have video- and music-playing capabilities built into them. It's true that BlackBerrys have neither the feature list nor the design cachet of an iPod, and they wouldn't be my first choice as a portable media player. But since you probably already lug one around, you might as well get the most out of it.
You'll first need to spend some money expanding the BlackBerry's internal memory, though that is cheap, and getting more so.
BlackBerrys use a form of flash memory -- which stores information even without power -- known as Micro SD. These days, a one-gigabyte Micro SD card, available online as well as at many computer stores, will run you around $10. The units go up in storage capacity from there, topping out these days around eight gigs, for around $135. A four-gig card costs about $40; by comparison, a one-gigabyte iPod Shuffle, which Apple says will hold 240 songs, costs $50. A gigabyte will also easily hold a feature movie, at least in a compressed version.
You transfer music and video onto your BlackBerry by hooking it up to your computer via the same USB cable you use when you connect the device for synching or charging. Moving files is a simple drag-and- drop operation; your Desktop Manager, which should have been installed on your main computer as part of your BlackBerry setup, includes a free Media Manager program, from the Roxio division of Sonic Solutions, that handles these chores.
The slightly challenging part of BlackBerry media is making sure the music or video file is in a format the device can recognize. With music, that's not much of a problem, since the BlackBerry understands most major music formats, including MP3 and AAC. About the only big thing it can't handle is a music file with some form of copy protection, a category that includes most music bought on iTunes.
There is a work-around to this, though. Simply use iTunes to burn protected music onto a CD drive, and then re-import the music as an MP3 or AAC file. (You're degrading the sound quality with each of these steps, but the difference may be too slight for you to notice.) Finally, copy to your BlackBerry.
Video, unfortunately, is a bit more complicated, because of the dozens of different technologies underlying all the video that is available these days.
The first thing you need to know is that for-pay downloaded movies, the sort now available in many places online but with viewing restrictions, simply can't be played, since the BlackBerry doesn't support the "digital rights management" software these movies need.
For all other video, the BlackBerry uses the same playback standards as many cellphones, including one called MPEG-4. Fortunately, a lot of video already is in one of these formats, including many free video podcasts, like the ones on iTunes. Just move them to your BlackBerry and enjoy.
Other video files must first be converted into a BlackBerry-friendly format. Roxio's Media Manager software will sometimes do this for you, automatically and in the background, as part of the process of moving a file from the desktop to your BlackBerry. As part of this process, Roxio formats the file for the BlackBerry's small screen.
Often, though, there are hitches along the way.
The Roxio software has a limited repertoire of underlying video technologies, especially of the "codecs" that determine how video is encoded. If you want to transfer a video file with a codec that Roxio doesn't know about, Media Manager will look elsewhere on your computer to try to find it. If that doesn't work, you may need to pull out your wallet again, either to buy the full version of Roxio's software ($60, though upgrades are usually less) or else to buy, usually for around $30, one of the growing number of specialized BlackBerry video converter programs available online. Most have free trial versions.
Note that video conversion seems to involve luck as much as technology; I could never predict when Roxio would, or would not, successfully convert a video file, such as the ".vob" files you get off video DVDs. Keep trying, and the video-transfer gods may decide to smile on you.
One of the most serious drawbacks of the BlackBerry is its use of the slow USB I connection protocol, rather than the speedier USB II that's in the iPod and elsewhere. A 40-minute, 180-megabyte video file took 15 seconds to transfer to an iPod, but 3 1/2 minutes to move to a BlackBerry. The device is also extremely pokey in navigating between folders of music or video files.
One gets the impression that music and video were afterthoughts, compared with the email or telephony for which most people use the BlackBerry. It won't take much effort, though, for BlackBerry's maker, Research In Motion Ltd., to address these shortcomings in future products. The BlackBerry may never win on style points, but as long as you can easily watch iPod commercials on it, who really cares?
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Mr. Gomes is a staff reporter in The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau. He can be reached at [email protected].
