Optimizing a Blackberry for browsing your favorite websites

I use my Blackberry 8703E religiously for checking the current state of affairs in the world every day. The built-in web browser works very well for basic sites with little formatting, but to get just a little bit more productivity out of the berry, you need to twist and pull just a little. What follows is my solution to fast, easy viewing and it involves basically two steps…

Step 1 involves optimizing the blackberry itself, and step 2 involves creating my own website that is a very basic PHP driven site that shows a basic text menu and draws in my favorite website content via RSS. Together these facilitate a great and fast reading experience with very little graphics and formatting to worry about. Just the news maam! On we go to Step 1:

Step 1: Start the web browser and enter the options menu, then “Browser Configuration”. Change the following settings to match what I have below:

• Content Mode: WML & HTML
• Show Images: On WML & HTML Pages
• Show Image Placeholders: Yes
• Emulation Mode: MS Pocket IE
• Support HTML Tables - Checked
• Use Foreground and Background Colors - Checked
• Use Background Images - Unchecked
• Support Embedded Media - Checked
• Support Javascript - Checked
• Allow JavaScript popups - Unchecked
• Support Style Sheets - Checked
• Style sheets media type: Handheld

Next, save out of there and go into “General Properties” of the browser and change to match the following:

• Default Font Family: BBClarity (this is by far the best font when small)
• Default Font Size: 6
• Minimum Font Size: 6
• Minimum Font Style: Plain
• Enable JavaScript Location Support: - Checked

While you are at it, I would change the default font for the system generally to BBClarity size 7 from BBMillbank size 8, which is the default I believe. Much better viewing in general.

Step 2: My website simply contains static hyperlinks that bring in the RSS content that is requested when you click on the link. The best part is it loads the content below the menu so that you always have access to the menu at the top of the page (by the way “T” gets you to the top of the page, and spacebar pages you down through the content…). The PHP page is based on rss2html.php from feedforall.com and works great.

I hope you learned something from this little tutorial and it should make your Blackberry much more enjoyable and informative to use every day. By the way, the address for my Blackberry page is here. Feel free to use it if you like, and I can always add another link if I get any demand for one that I don’t have. My bias is obviously for Tech News…

Enjoy.