Google Wins When Blackberry Fails

Full disclosure:  I am a Blackberry fan.  I’m also a fan of Google.

Thursday, Blackberry email was down for a good portion of the day in many areas of the country.  I was affected.  I turned my phone on around 6:15am EST and received about 5 messages.  I didn’t get another message pushed to my phone until 2:21pm.  And I was out of the office for most of that time.  Did I panic?  Of course not.

I run all of my emails through Gmail.  I love the spam protection.  And the search, and the filtering, and the muting, and the “cloudiness” of it all.  Google has a mobile app at m.google.com.  While I do not use the Gmail function in place of Blackberry’s “pushy” email… for days like Thursday, it sure does come in handy.  When I realized that that I wasn’t getting messages, I opened up the mobile Gmail and let the messages come to my Curve while Blackberry sorted out its email problem.

I didn’t miss a beat.  But I did complain on Twitter.  The complaint had no teeth, I really just did it for “shiggles.”

So, over the holidays set up your Gmail account. Then go to Settings, and walk through the steps of importing your various emails (up to 5) to your Gmail account.  It’s take a few minutes and is very simple.  Even if you don’t put it on your Blackberry, it serves as a great backup.  Google gives you so much storage (7400 MB), you never have to delete. It is so easy to find messages from last year.

Once again, a free service from Google saves the day. And that is priceless, when you are a networker on the go, miles away from the safety of your office and computer.

And have you looked into the new Google/Feedburner Socialize feature?

Tagged as: blackberry, Gmail, google, m.google.com, Mobile phone, Twitter