I was excited to see the release of Blackberry Desktop Manager for Mac a few hours earlier than expected. Of course I immediately downloaded the application which is relatively small — the DMG file is just 28 MB. And they did a great job with it!
After loading the application I was required to reboot the system. After a quick reboot the desktop manager launched quickly. It offers a clean, simple interface.
First off it showed me that I had an update available for my Blackberry. This is most likely because I had to downgrade the system after a fatal error a few days ago.
That’s when I saw the first benefit of the new desktop manager — it handled the entire process of upgrading the device OS without my having to do a single thing.
While I was updating I had a chance to get a sense of what the desktop manager looks like. It is quite simple — the calendar, contacts, notes, tasks and music are all accessible from the sidebar.
The ability to manage applications, restore the device or sync the device are handled from icons at the top of the desktop manager. That’s really all there is to the desktop manager and, to my mind, that’s a good thing. Managing your handheld device should be simple and not take too much thought and that’s clearly what Blackberry has achieved here.
Since I am using Google calendar, e-mail and contacts the ability to sync those aspects of the device aren’t all that important to me. the ability to sync my task to music, however, is important and fortunately, the desktop manager makes that easy as well.
The process of syncing my music was just as easy as everything else. The software showed me how much space is available on a memory card, it automatically showed me the playlists available from iTunes and how many songs from those playlists are not locked by DRM and can therefore be synced over to the Blackberry.
I then simply click sync and it took care of the rest.
The bottom line is this — the Blackberry desktop manager for MacOS X is a simple, light application that handles its specific tasks well. It’s easy to use and that’s exactly what I needed.