Conclusion

It's difficult to adequately judge the effectiveness of myBoxTone Expert at this point for a number of reasons. First off, it's clear that application is still in beta and needs a bit of work. For example, when I installed the app on my BlackBerry 8820, the bottom quarter of the home screen was cut off, and I couldn't see the memory card metrics that were supposed to be there.

Secondly, there's no real way to test the suggested issue resolution instructions, because you'd need actual problems to solve to gauge the effectiveness. The application does let you simulate issues and view resolution details, but there's no easy way to determine how the recommended solutions work without creating real issues--something I was not willing to do for the purposes of this article.

myBoxTone Expert Home Screen

Some of the resolution instructions provided also appear to describe the simplest ways to fix issues, but not necessarily the most effective. For instance, after simulating the Card Memory Full warning, I was instructed to go into my media application and delete images one by one to free up memory. This could take a substantial chunk of time. The best way to quickly delete images or other media is to simply connect your BlackBerry to a PC and use RIM's Desktop Manager software to delete all the images you want to remove in one fell swoop.

Overall, the application delivers on its promise to help BlackBerry users address and possibly resolve their own issues, and its ability to send screen shots and various BlackBerry diagnostics is sure to reduce the time it takes for IT to fix problems that users can't on their own. myBoxTone Expert has the potential to be a particularly valuable tool for organizations that deploy many BlackBerrys to novice or less-tech-savvy users.