Friday, March 13, 2009

Life Changing Shortcuts on Your Blackberry Pearl

By Paul Herrington

The scroll ball or "pearl" on your Blackberry is made to work in a similar way to a mouse on a computer. Unfortunately, a mouse isn't necessarily fast, it's simple. That's what a mouse or scroll ball was designed to do, simply things on a computer or in this case, a smartphone. If you want fast, you're going to need to master a little trick known as "keyboard shortcuts".

Just like most of the software on your computer, your Blackberry Pearl has some hidden shortcuts that can speed things up dramatically for you. You can still use your scroll ball and the Blackberry button, but it pays to learn at least a handful of the most popular shortcuts. I don't know anyone who uses them all (there are a LOT), but I know I would be very frustrated with the ones I'm going to show you today.

Keyboard Shortcuts

A lot of businesses will spell out their phone number to help you remember it. That's great for remembering but it's worthless for those of us using a Blackberry Pearl. If you compare the keyboard on your Pearl with one on a traditional phone, you'll notice the letters don't land on the same numbers.

I've actually had situations where I would look at a "regular" phone and translate the word into numbers so I could dial it on my Blackberry Pearl. Thankfully I've learned of a secret little keyboard trick that eliminates this problem. As you're dialing a number, when you get to the part where you need to spell, just press and hold the ALT key (t's the one just below ZX on the left) and then spell the word using "multi-tap."

What is multi-tap? If you've ever had to type in a password on a website with your Blackberry Pearl, you've most likely used multi-tap. For example, if you want to type the letter "K" using multi-tap, you'd press the number 6 twice since "K" is the second letter on that key ("J" is the first).

If you want to make a payment using your phone with Verizon Wireless, you'd simply press #PMT and send, but not on a Pearl. Now, knowing what we just learned we can press # and then hold down ALT while we press "." twice, "9" once and "2" once. If that's confusing, take a look at your Pearl and see that this spells PMT using multi-tap. Press send and you're all set to make your payment.

Managing Your Messages With Shortcuts

There have been several occasions where I read an email and didn't reply to it right away. It happens all the time. Later, I'll look through my list of message and reply. The keyboard shortcut is to reply is to highlight the message you want (or have it open already) and press the "!" key. That's it.

Normally you'd have to select the message, open it, press the Blackberry button, scroll down to reply and press the pearl button. Kind of a pain when instead you can just press ! and start typing your message. You can reply to all by pressing "?" key or if you want to forward a message just press "." on the right side of the keyboard. Commit those to memory and you'll save a lot of time.

This is probably my 2nd favorite Blackberry Pearl shortcut. Stop typing in the period at the end of each sentence. No, this won't cause a bunch of run-on sentences nobody can understand. Instead of typing the period, just press space twice. Try it now and see what happens. Like magic, your Pearl adds in the period and you can keep on typing. Your Pearl is also smart enough to add in the @ symbol when you press space while adding an email address.

One more little tip that will help you sort through all of your messages on your Blackberry Pearl. With your list of messages open, try holding down ALT and pressing "S". This will show you just your SMS messages. Hold ALT and press "P". That's just a listing of your phone messages or your call log. Hold down ALT and press "V" and you'll see a list of your voice mail messages. Hold ALT and press "I" and you'll only see your incoming messages. When you're done, press the escape key and you're back to your default view of messages.

I've found, if I try to learn too many shortcuts at one time, I never really master them. So, instead, just focus on these few I've given you and you'll have them memorized in no time at all. These are so powerful and are useful so often, they really will speed up your navigation on your phone. Than you can move on to more important things. - 16890

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