I love my new Pearl 8130. It does everything, and it does most of them very well. One thing I was looking forward to doing was being able to view email attachments on the Pearl... pdf's, word documents, etc.

TECHNICALLY, I can do this. However, functionally this option is useless due to the incredibly crappy resolution of attachments. There is NO WAY I can read anything typed in smaller than about 24-point type. When I zoom in all I see is a blurry mess. It's not the files themselves... I can transfer the same file (in an image format like JPG or GIF, no PDF viewer for BB yet) to the device and zoom in easily and clearly. It must be that the blackberry mail server is somehow compressing the files as images to a low-res variant, maybe to save on bandwidth, I don't know.

What I do know is that this is a useless feature and is in fact more annoying than not having the ability to view attachments at all. I never had this problem on my Palm, attachments were crisp and clear.

Am I missing something here? Is there a better way? Or should I just be happy I can view, if not actually READ, my attachments?

Dave

I have never found a way to increase the view size of a PDF and still see if clearly. Word file are ok. This may not be a problem with other devices rather the method the BB os is using to display a PDF.

Once you zoom in there should be an option on your menu - Enhance. This will clear up the blurriness. The problem is that you lose the ability to scroll out of that view. You have to back out, zoom into another area and enhance again. Very tedious to read a page, but it can be done. 99% of the time, it's not worth it to me to go thru all that work, I just wait til I get to a computer.

Aaaahhhhhh. thank you. That is what I was looking for. YOu're right, 99% of the time it's not worth it but once in awhile it's really convenient to be able to read, say, a PDF quote that someone has sent to me without going back to my office to the computer.

I don't know why BB would set up this arrangement. It does save on bandwidth as the whole attachment is not downloaded by default, but one would think that if I chose to open an attachment, that would indicate I'd actually like to read it. Or not?

Dave

Dave

Completely agree. Maybe it's a memory management issue? Would at least like the ability for it to auto enhance while zoomed and allow scrolling. Maybe download the enhancements similar to how the Google and Blackberry Maps work. Hopefully it will be much improved when 4.5 handheld software is released. (knock, knock)