Which one do you prefer and why?

I have used three of the four you list, and all do a decent job. They vary in price, and they all offer different varying degrees of representing HTML, the best they can. BBSmart offers email injection to calendar and tasks--I appreciate that feature the most of any.

I voted for BBSmart! (Sorry, maybe I shouldn't have!)

Oh and JSanders, none of those in the list are free...

Thank you, corrected.

I tried BBSmart and Empower. The results are similar and BBSmart is more full featured. If I was going just for price, I would have gone Empower but a couple of things bother me about Empower.

Empower by default overlays your signature with their advertisement. Yes its true there is an option to turn it off but it shouldn't be there in the first place. When I did the trial, I was shocked as I didn't realize they did this and found the setting myself. Why even have that in your software?

OK, let's keep this thread on topic to what you prefer, and not another direct bashing of one product or the other.

Thanks.

Wirelessly posted (BlackBerry 9000: BlackBerry8300/4.2.2 Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 VendorID/102)

I have been using Empower which is good for the price but I too found out that I had been sending emails with the Empower advertisement. I didn't like that at all, especially since I am using their software to VIEW my emails and not to SEND them. Either way because the BB is a business device, if a piece of software is going to alter my signature I need to know about it.

Objective: I've used empower and smart and prefer BBsmart. Seems to load images more consistently for me.

Subjective: The nail in the coffin for me was the signature issue with empower that a couple people have mentioned. It's one thing to put that stuff in trial software - where the software is actually sending email through its servers, but after I own the reg code I think it's a little....ummm, disconcerting. My friend was sending me emails from his business addy and didn't realize that empower had preempted his sig.

I just downloaded BBSmart and all I can say is WOW!

I am betting the RIM will be including something like this soon.

HTML email is "rumored" in the OS 4.3.

love BMail (http://www.*******.com/BMail/ota.pl)

1. Its free
2. Support is great
3. Does not add a sig on any outgoing mail (since it uses BB native email program)
4. Ongoing enhancements

tried Empower, another good app, but it did inserted a sig at the bottom on my messages which meant my own sig was pushed further down..

I've tested BB Smart and Empower and although I liked the added functions of BB Smart I found that there was significantly less of a delay in in the conversion of the email with Empower ......

nothing goes thru their servers....its just a signature that gets added to outgoing emails. i turned it off as soon as i loaded the program.

I tried both BBsmart and Empower extensively. What I found was that each rendered email differently, usually in subtle ways which depends upon the particular characteristics of email you receive. RIM has this infernal policy of mutilating HTML email on their servers before you can receive it. If you receive HTML mail regularly from a particular source, it seems to arrive mutilated in a consistant fashion. Thus, when it comes to displaying such email, there is a difference between these two email viewers.

I based MY final choice upon the following(YOUR experience will differ)

1. For my own needs, both Empower and BBsmart feature sets were satisfactory, so that was a non-issue.

2. I liked the fact that Empower occupies a smaller memory footprint than BBsmart.

3. I liked the fact that Empower was less expensive than BBsmart.

4. For the email which I typically receive, Empower renders it faster than BBsmart.

5. For the email which I typically receive, Empower rendered it in a fashion which I preferred over BBsmart.

So, I kept the Empower email viewer.

I think the only way to successfully choose between email viewers is to take the time to trial all the viewers and select the one which serves your needs best. The good news is that the trial versions are fully featured, so you can get the complete experience with each, before making a final choice.

trial version for bbsmart was 4 days, which was too short, and didn't get images to load consistently (yes, emailed the tech support). So decided not to purchase a product for $25 that didn't work fully after my trial version.

I'm a new BB user and I'm using Empower - however I must admit that I was not yet a member here and honestly did not know of any other HTML viewers.

I was disappointed to see that no HTML was natively supported and quite happy to find an app that changed that for me. Truthfully it does not show anywhere near all the HTML that is contained in messages, but it is nice just to not have to see all the HTML tags spelled out all through each message; that was very distracting with the native default viewer.

Just for the record, I did not know about the signature spam either until I saw a copy of a message I sent on my PC - and the option to remove it is not obvious at all; you do have to drill down to find it.

Also, I have experienced a couple issues that I am pretty sure are caused by the HTML viewer and wrote to Empower about them a day ago. No response at all as of yet, which is not encouraging. The issues are that occasionally when a message goes into Auto-More, the hourglass spins and the device seems to lock-up, requiring a battery pull to get out of it. I initially thought it might be messages that were too graphics-intensive, but after looking at them on my PC that's not the case. I'm presently reviewing the HTML code of the one message it happened with to see if I can find any offending code. Other issue is that when Empower is enabled, after the first Auto-More I find it extremely difficult to scroll the message back up.

Anyone else seeing either of these issues?

Thanks.

BBsmart for me plain and simple I like the company and its attitude. I tried three of the four listed and its BBsmart all the way. I even carry a link to them in my sig becuase I thought they were a great company.

The blackberry server extracts most of the html from an email before it is sent to your blackberry. The html viewers try and take whats left and reconstruct the original but the results can never match because they are guessing.

If the Empower viewer is giving you problems, you can try BBSmart and see if the results are any better for you. You can actually delete and reinstall both to make a comparison on what works best for you.

you can actually have both installed at the same time. (just not active at the same time) It is a good way to test out the differences between the way they render on the exact same email. This ultimately led me to choose Empower over BBSmart. Also, I felt that BBSmart loaded a bit slower than Empower.

EMPOWER..the only way to go! I mean $10, it's the best!

BBSmart, I only tried that and empower. When I am using my personal email address that I don't feel like changing along with work things, the last thing I ever want to do is not trust a company. Just my .02..

ditto

Well aware of this. I was drawing a comparison between Empower and any app whose data may go through the developers servers (DocHawk, Opera..i believe, etc). I changed the sig as soon as I realized it was there, but my first issue was that for me BBSmart just rendered better and the few seconds more it takes to render than Empower was worth the wait to have images consistently load. I deal with a lot of email which has images in it (i'm a moderator at a paintball website and write for a magazine).

I like that one too (I've written about that in these forums).

Interestingly, the url is *'d out here, but you can always try pinstack. This viewer is free and the developers seem to want to make it competitive with the non-free ones.

The signature is an option now, has been since its release 1.0, comes defaulted to not include it (which also has been posted many times on these forums).

Tony

Empower - for 10 bucks you can't go wrong. Tried BB Smart and Empower. Empower's trial was a week and really gave me a chance to use it. BB Smart was only 24 hours (hint - extend your trial).

I think way back in the v1.0 days it was for two days. It was never one day. We're now up to v2.2 so it has changed a lot since then in terms of features & functionality too (including trial duration).

I voted for BBSmart, even though I registered Empower. Here's why... I just switched devices, and - even though I was using Empower - I decided to try BBSmart (because I hadn't before as I was one of the ones who did the free license thing from Empower).

BBSmart's interface is cleaner, I actually like the popup showing the image loading progress, and it doesn't add the spam to my signature (by default, upon installation - which leads me to question some things... Why is this necessary? And why do they continue to keep this in place after a fair number complaints?) .

Additionally, like Dawg and others, I have been impressed by eZainny's helpful and professional manner here on the boards.

That said, Empower does what I need it to do and does it a little faster. I think attweco hit the nail on the head: you need to try them all - and see what works for your particular situation.

Somewhere down the road I may make the jump to BBSmart, depending on the features added and how competitive the cost is...

I beg to differ. I purchased v. 2.0 earlier this week and the default is with the signature on. Plus, nothing tells you about the signature so the first you know about it is when you copy a message to an email address of your own, or someone who received an email from you asks you about it.

The option is tucked away in a second "advanced" options page, so it is easy to miss at first. I didn't even know about the so-called "Advanced Options" for Empower until I started hunting for the signature option to see if I could kill it.

It should default to no branded signature... but it doesn't currently. I guess that's the cost of an inexpensive solution...

Mine has never defaulted except .05 or something like that to default signature so I cannot explain why your did. I even think in one of the forums, the developer "Ani" indicated that he changed that.

Tony

When I tried it out a couple of weeks ago, the signature defaulted to ON. There is no reason for it even being there in the first place. It's only function is to spam the receivers.

Stay no topic people. Lol.

I don't know why. I'm still using it -- I'm not holding that against the developer so far as to ditch the program. But as I said, I didn't know there was a promotional signature until someone told me about it, and then I had to dig to find the Advanced Options and turn it off. I was about to write Ani and ask how to remove it when I finally saw the option!

Works well, otherwise. I didn't know about the BBSmart app at the time, but looking at it after the fact, I'm glad I saw the $10 viewer before the $25 viewer.

What is the trial period now?

Mine defaulted to have the signature ON too. I just tried it last week I think. It really ticked me off when I happened to scroll down on a reply to one of my emails and it had that spam line on it.

I find the ability to immediately transfer an email to a calender or task to be quite useful; this feature sold me on BBSmart.

That's in the free email viewer, BMail, also.

Just turn if off then? Shouldn't be a big issue.

Tony

I just downloaded BlackBerry Smart today. It's great. The emails do open a tad slower but that's not a problem to me. The trial is 4 days. Personally I wouldn't use an app that changes my sig & adds a link without informing me first it was going to do that. IMO, that's just not ok.

Thanks.

I did a lot of research into good HTML viewers, and I chose a free one (BMail). I've written about that in these forums. The URL is starred out on these forums, but you can try pinstack. What I found is that BMail is competitive, and that the developers are actively engaged in making it more so. They just added the ability to put an image in the background, based on user input.

There has been much ado about things like email signatures and the ability to put email into calendar appointments. BMail doesn't add a signature, and it does put email into calendar appointments.

The next question is: does BBSmart give you reasonable time to try it out? Apparently, the trial period is 4 days. EZainny, please feel free to jump in to correct this if it is wrong.

4 days is way below standard. The question is, why such a short period?

EZainny?