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A love affair with this little gadget can play havoc with your t by Perkal

I have just returned from a second session with my physiotherapist. I thought I had an upper back problem. But, the physio, the expert trained in the ins and outs of the human body, quickly diagnosed my problem and broke the news to me.

There was nothing wrong with my upper back or the right side of my neck. The sharp, acute pain I was feeling was the symptom of overindulging in something that had grown on me. You see, over the past few months I have been trying out a new gadget in my life. It had been punted by so many colleagues and its manufacturers but we, the cynical types, always want to make these discoveries ourselves. First must come the test drive and then our opinion - good or bad.

After a few minutes of examination, the physiotherapist smiled and said to me: "You have a Blackberry thumb..."

"What?" I asked.

"How many e-mail messages do you get a day?" she inquired as the instrument vibrated, for the umpteenth time in 10 minutes, on her desk.

A few months ago, I was introduced to the Blackberry. For me a phone has always been just that, a phone. Yet, the demands of modern life and the rigours of work have meant that I had to search for a tool that would help me to be efficient and that would make all the other gadgets that I have had to carry in the past irrelevant.

The beauty of the Blackberry is the ability of the technology on this phone to connect easily with your work server. Your e-mail reaches you anywhere, anytime.

But, if your e-mail address is on the books of public relations companies and communication sections of government departments, you're in for it. It's even worse when, for whatever reason, the e-mail sender or senders seem to think that, to get your attention, they need to send everything twice.

I have thought about advising the Blackberry manufacturers to consider a filter to screen out repeated mail. The duplicate mail would be sent back to the sender with a less than polite note. Something along the lines of: "We heard you the first time..."

When you first get connected, the sheer volume of the mail overwhelms you. It just never seems to stop. But, this inconvenience is mitigated by the ability to respond immediately to crucial e-mails.

The joy of saving time and being efficient in your communication is what keeps you sane when the in-box keeps on beeping. The ability to synchronise makes diary management less stressful.

But, the manufacturers of Blackberry - and most other phones-have to do something about the low capacity of the phone to store contacts. Some of the important telephone numbers in my Outlook do not get transferred on to my device during synchronisation because of lack of capacity.

What also worked for me on the Blackberry is the speed at which you get connected to the internet and the high resolution offered by the screen.

The ability to download PDFs and other documents makes this an indispensable working tool.

We have been able to publish some of the photographs captured by the camera, which has zoom capabilities. But, the down side of the camera is that, although there is space to file video material, the Blackberry Curve 8310 that I had for a test drive could not shoot any videos. Someone forgot to install a video camera.

I also really enjoyed the Navigator GPS programme that arrived with the phone, but, sadly, I seem to have lost it after the phone came back from being repaired.

This is the one defect Blackberry needs to fix. While they are at it, they might also want to look at their after-sales service.

When I picked up a small software problem in the device, I took it in three times, each time being promised that something had been done, when it had not.

It took the intervention of executives at RIM, the local distributors of Blackberry, to get some action. But not every Blackberry owner is able to get the attention of the people at the top.

The physiotherapist said I had a problem with the nerve next to my thumb because I simply could not put the Blackberry down. She was right. When you get bitten by this bug, it is difficult to let go - problems and all.

This article was published on Friday 03 October, 2008.

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