Blackberry as a Music Player

Kingston 4GB Card

I keep all my music in iTunes on my computer.

I got upset this week when the taxi to the airport came early, and I left my iPod on my desk before I went on a trip.  

This left me listening to music on my Blackberry 8820-- something I never did.  Luckily I had my corded headset rather than my Bluetooth one, which does not work so well.

Happily I had put a few gigabytes of songs on it. This worked pretty well; the Blackberry model 8820 is a decent music player -- too big to exercise with, but it plays music out loud pretty well. 

My Blackberry and my company laptop are both locked down, so I had to pull the microSD card from the Blackberry, put it in a card reader to work with the files. No problem, since I keep a card reader in my bag. 

Blackberry Model 8820

MicroSD cards are not easy to work with. On the Model 8820, the SD card does not go in a slot, but you need to open the battery compartment and access it there. The mechanism is tricky and small -- it takes practice to change it quickly.

There is no good online help for changing the card.  Place your finger on the steel holder, and slide it down toward the keyboard end of the unit. It should slide a millimeter, and then lift the top end of the card up at an angle. Once it is unlocked, the MicroSD card slides out easily.

Soon the card lost its formatting, and the Blackberry would not recognize it, and naturally the company laptop's disk formatting utility is locked. It was a Kingston 4 GB card that got corrupted. 

When I got back, I reformatted the card on my Apple, and got the Blackberry working. When I reformatted the card the first time, I manually put all the MP3 files back on. This turned out to be the wrong idea. It is easier to use the Blackberry utility for Mac to do that. The Blackberry utility wants the microSD card to be completely blank.

The Blackberry utility has the clever name "Blackberry Desktop Software," and it works pretty well. It reads the iTunes playlists and downloads them.  The utility also puts photos on the Blackberry quickly, but the Blackberry's processer can't show them quickly.