WorldMate Live: A Travel Maestro

The WorldMate Live service aims to simplify the lives of frequent travelers by automatically delivering a variety of valuable content and services to mobile devices. Free features include the My Itineraries function, which stores information on flights, hotels, meetings, public transportation and car rentals on BlackBerrys. The application also lets you export travel information from booking confirmation e-mails, corporate calendars and more, directly into WorldMate Live, and it automatically assembles your itineraries. You can even read hotel reviews from other WorldMate Live users and then book a residence directly from the application.

WorldMate Live on the BlackBerry Storm

The "Clocks" feature provides the current time and weather for one set location, as well as the time differences in four additional cities of the your choice. The Weather function offers a five day forecast for any major city, and the currency converter quickly translates U.S. dollars into Euros or Japanese yen and back again.

Finally, a full color, searchable map of the world provides locations of cities as well as the date and time of day in each selected location.

The Storm-specific version of WorldMate Live is exactly like the general BlackBerry version, and it doesn't use the Storm accelerometer so you can only view the application in landscape mode, for now.

Download WorldMate Live OTA for the BlackBerry Storm by visiting the company's site via BlackBerry Browser.

Opera Mini: You Can Never Have Too Many Browsers

The BlackBerry browser that ships along with BlackBerry OS 4.7 on the Storm works significantly better than previous versions of RIM's Web surfing app. However, some of those earlier versions were so weak that I became accustomed to--and even fond of--Opera Software's free Opera Mini browser.

So naturally, Opera Mini was one of the first BlackBerry apps I installed on the Storm. Unfortunately, though the latest version of the software, v4.2, works on the device, it's not Storm-specific: therefore, some of the browser's most basic functions don't work as well as they should--or at all. For example, zooming in on pages using Opera Mini on a BlackBerry typically calls for a few clicks of the trackball. But the Storm is trackball-less and clicking the screen doesn't zoom like you might expect.

Opera Mini 4.2 on the BlackBerry Storm

The app does, however, work with the Storm's accelerometer, so you can view pages in both portrait and landscape modes. But beware of switching orientation while a page is loading, as it could keep the page from rendering correctly. In fact, if you do change your screen orientation from portrait to landscape while loading a page, or vice versa, an on-screen dialogue box warns you that you may want to reload the page in the current orientation.

Like newer versions of the BlackBerry browser, Opera Mini gives you a tiny cursor that you can move around to any spot or link on a page, instead of having to scroll up and down to get to the links you want. Alternatively, you can also use a number of keypad shortcuts for navigation--however, this is a bit awkward since the Storm's keyboard takes up valuable screen space.

Though not perfect for the Storm, Opera Mini's a valid alternative to the default BlackBerry browser.

Download Opera Mini OTA via BlackBerry browser from Opera Software's website.