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Every time my friend John (“The Cisco God”) gets a new cell phone he boasts “It’s the best phone I’ve ever had.”  Then he gets a new one and says the same thing again.  My Blackberry 8830 isn’t just the best phone I’ve ever had; it’s the best phone ever.  I love the thing.  I’ve used Palm and Windows Mobile before, and compared to the Blackberry, well, (to be nice about it) they’re not so great.

Lately I’ve had an issue where messages on my phone disappear.  They don’t get deleted from my Inbox (we use BES with Exchange), but they’re gone from the phone.  My recent calls list disappears as well.  A little Googling helped me find that the problem might be a lack of memory.  I checked, and sure enough, the “File Free” line showed 0 bytes.

I figured I’d just go get a micro SD card for the phone (I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy one anyway) and put the apps that I use and my email on the memory card.  I found a $12 card (1GB) at Best Buy and installed it.  It was recognized right away and looked like it would be the ideal solution.

But no.  It wasn’t.

More Googling made me aware that you can’t put email or applications on your memory card.  That can’t be true, can it?  I did even more Googling and found that it seems to be true.  Well, that’s no good.  I wonder what I can put on my memory card.  Then I found it.

Media.

You can only put media on the card.  Like pictures and video.  Not email.  Not email attachments (unless, I suppose, if the attachment is a picture).  Not documents.  Just media.  One guy in a forum I found said that you might as well call it a “Media Card” because that’s all the Blackberry will let you use it for.

The catch here is that my 8830 doesn’t have a camera.  So yeah, I could load several thousand 320×240 resolution photos on the card and look at them anytime I wanted, but that’s pretty much all I can do with it.

It’s not a total loss.  My wife has a Blackberry with a camera, and she’ll be able to use the card.  She’ll even think I was sweet and thoughtful to buy it for her (until she reads this.  Hi, Honey!).

And now I’m back to square one with my Blackberry running out of memory.  If anybody out there’s got an idea for resolving this, let me know.  I typically use Opera Mini, Google Maps, Gmail App, “Mail By Google” for my own domain’s mail, and an SSH client.  Restarting the phone regularly seems to help the problem, but that’s not an acceptable solution to me.

If you’ve got a solution to this issue, let me know.  I’ll be off installing this memory card in my wife’s phone.

(oh, and for all you Mactards who would suggest an iPhone, as soon as they get a real keyboard and - more importantly - a non-AT&T provider, I’ll consider it.)