Hello everyone, I've recently bought my first Blackberry last week and been enjoying it alot. And I thought I'd share my experience a little.

I used to have a regular phone through Sprint since high school, that's almost 10 years ago. Due to my nature of my work, amount of email that I had to juggle grew exponentially. During the day I'd get flood of emails that needs my attention but couldn't deal with because I wasn't in front of my computer. So I decided to purchase a Blackberry.

I ordered the 8830 over the internet and received it 2 days later. Then I called Sprint to transfer my number from my previous phone to. Everything went smooth. But it took a day for my data service to kick in. The operator at sprint told me 4 hours. The wait made me more eager and anxious. So decided to do lot of research.

When my data plan kicked in, I immediately set my email accounts (gmail for private and other for my work) up and started to poke around with it. And soon downloaded the GMail app. Which blew me away. It had all the features that regular gmail had! But I was disappointed that it didn't do PUSH.

So I set up BIS for my gmail and tested it out. Although the interface wasn't pretty, but it was simple and fast. I love PUSH and how it notifies me about my emails as soon as they come. But, again, I was disappointed that the messages that were marked read on BIS gmail weren't being marked on actual gmail. That meant I had to check the same mail twice!!! Which I do not want. So I did a thorough search on google and multiple forums to realize that this is just not possible.

Just out of curiosity I made an account with Yahoo and decided to try BIS with that account. Lo and behold, the messages that were mark read on BB are marked on mail.yahoo.com as well!!!! Realizing that this is not a technical issue but just a feature that google hasn't adapted, I was very disapointed at GMail. (Besides, Yahoo BIS has its own unique icon that's pretty )

But because my life is in GMail, I don't think I'll be doing any migration over to Yahoo. I really hope that google makes its BIS sync the read messages in the future.

But other then that, I LOVE how my email is with me whenever and wherever I am.

Thank you for reading my long, maybe bit boring, impression.

My impressions on Internet Browsing, Multimedia Functionality and 3rd party apps will follow soon.

What I started doing was having GMail forward e-mails that come in to my Yahoo! account. That way I can have the two way sync with that account. Then, I have GMail just archive its copy so if I ever want to look for the message again, I will have it. I only have the Yahoo! account set up in BIS, too, and have the GMail app. So if there is a message I want to get in GMail I just fire up the app and search for it.

Also, I have it set up in BIS that if I send an e-mail (which would use the Yahoo! account) that the reply to address is my GMail account. That way all the messages still come through the GMail e-mail address.

Thank you for the tip!
But if I let my gmail mail to foward to yahoo mail, wouldn't that create the same problem?

Here's the scenario:

1. mail (unread) arrives at GMail
2. then it's forwarded to Yahoo
3. then it gets pushed to my BB
4. when I read the email on BB it's marked read on BB
5. then through magic it's marked on Yahoo
6. but it's still left unread at GMail

so, even after reading the mail on BB, I would have to read it again on GMail .com to mark it read. And if archiving option marks the email to be read, that's not the behavior that I want. Sometimes I want to check my email on the web and if I didn't check it on my BB, I want it to be marked unread.

I don't want my BB to be only gmail client. I want all my access to gmail to be synchronized.

Or am I missing something?