Blackberries - any aviation uses
 

I have been offered a Blackberry by work although I suspect I wont have much work related use for it. However I wondered if it had any aviation uses. As I understand it I can use it to read emails, make phone calls and surf the web so presumably checking the weather will be possible but can I plug a GPS into it like a PDA and run Pocket FMS or the like. What about weight and balance programmes - anything like that available or is it not programmeable in that way.

Thanks

grow45

PS Flogging it on ebay and using the proceeds to pay for flying had occurred to me but might not go down to well at work.

Nope, they are "remote" terminals not intelligent devices as such. My life is empty without my "crackberry" but other than web browser apps there is nothing else you can with it.

You can use the metoffice website up to about 2,500 to 3,000 feet. Stick the relevant METARs page on and you can refresh as you are going along. Quite illegal, but no doubt very useful for those criminal souls who do so.

Ask for an O2 XDA Exec its basically a mini-PC and apart from the sheer size of the thing its not bad!

J.

blackberry
 

The Blackberry is great at what it does and absolutely useless for anything else. It has a relatively poor web browser (depending on which version you get) and beyond emails and calendar stuff cant be used for much else. There are programmes which are written for its operating system but none that I know of in the aviation sphere.

Pretty much all of http://fly.dsc.net works on a Blackberry (e.g. weather, route calcs, notams, etc)

ff,

Emails, calendar stuff, web browser, phone (and I have yet to see a good handheld browser)... What else do youwant?

QDM

I've toyed with the idea of getting one solely for aviation purposes. I spoke to a guy recently that uses one for flight planning etc. I like the idea that you can get homebriefing.com on the web browser and file/delay/cancel flight plans easliy.

Also I read the other day that you can connect them to a laptop easily and use them as a 3G modem. So if you had a laptop in the plane you could use it to connect to the internet on the laptop, especially useful when abroad.

Nokia E61 is a better tool. It has a web browser on it which can be accessed with its 3G modem but also (which I thought was damn useful) if you are near a WI-FI modem you can surf the web at broadband speed on one of these little things!!

I am lead to beleive that a blackberry has a very important use in aviation, one sadly neglected these days.
CHOCKS
Not much use otherwise. Web browser is iffy, mail is even more iffy. My advice, get a phone and a PDA. Now with a proper PDA you can add bluetooth GPS and so-on