Mobile WorkHorse

By Al Sacco
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Al Sacco writes about (and drools over) anything and everything mobile or wireless as it applies to the global workforce--with a focus on BlackBerry smartphones

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Al Sacco

Got a BlackBerry or RIM-Related Question? Ask BlackBerry Answers!

Posted July 24, 2008 to Technology Topics |
. What's this?

We'd like to think CIO.com is your number-one destination for BlackBerry software information, how-tos, tutorials, tips and tricks, advice and more, but we don't pretend to believe one website can answer every question you have or fix whatever issue you may come upon. However, a new Web-based service from RIM, dubbed BlackBerry Answers, just might be the next best thing.

Launched last month in Canada and for the rest of North America in mid-July, BlackBerry Answers is an easy-to-use, intuitive—and best of all, free—service offered by RIM that lets you plug a question into an online field and receive an answer based on the company's "premium knowledgebase collateral such as user manuals, getting started guides and support knowledge base material." You'll even get diagrams along with your answers, where available.

screen shot of BlackBerry Answers
BlackBerry Answers

To access BlackBerry Answers, just click the default BlackBerry Help icon on your device's home screen, or if you're like us and you deleted the help app long ago to free up valuable storage space, you can surf on over to RIM's mobile.blackberry.com site and click the Help icon on the home page.

We haven't had too much time to experiment with BlackBerry Answers yet, but two out of the three questions we asked resulted in, we'll say, "satisfactory" answers. For example, when we searched "How do I use microSD media cards?" a short paragraph of text was delivered along with a suggestion to see the "printed documentation that came with your device." Not a whole lot of help, but a start.

When we asked BlackBerry answers how to back up and restore handheld data, we got a slightly better response, which suggested using the BlackBerry Desktop Manager software to do so. And it also suggested a few other things to search for to find related information.

Finally, we were a bit disappointed to find that we couldn't locate any information on BlackBerry tethering, via USB, Bluetooth or otherwise, on BlackBerry Answers, even though we tried a variety of search queries.

If we had to rank the service on a scale of one to 10, one representing the least satisfied option, we'd give it a five, though it's worth reiterating, we've only spent half an hour or so testing BlackBerry Answers.

Surf on over to RIM's mobile site, give it try for yourself and then let us know what you think.

Thanks to Joe at BBGeeks.com for pointing this out.

AS

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