Google App services for Blackberry - yes, they exist

Ok, so we made the big switch, and now I have to make my wife's Blackberry tolerable before she kills me.

I know she's going to hate the keyboard - at least for a while. She and I are both pretty good at Graffiti, and it's great to be able to scrawl a quick "ink" note on the screen. There's nothing like that on the BB. At the moment I doing text entry at about 1/10th the speed of non-predictive Graffiti 1.0. The prediction engine is really struggling with URLs and other non-word strings. It doesn't help that the manual has gone missing.

So I was looking about for ways to ease the pain, so I figured I'd try the Gmail client. It installed, but it doesn't work with Google Apps. It directed me to the web UI for her Google Apps Gmail. Yech.

Happily, I persisted. It turns out that there IS a version of the client for Google Apps Mail, and for other Google App things besides -- including synchronization with the Google Calendar ...

Gogle Apps Mobile

... Gmail mobile application for BlackBerry® smartphones

... BlackBerry® smartphone users can access their mail around town with a slick new Gmail application. Download the free application by browsing to http://m.google.com/a from the internet browser on your BlackBerry® smartphone. Within minutes, you'll be sending and reading messages, just like you can from a standard computer browser. It's fast, and allows access to your entire message archive. You can even open attachments, like Microsoft Word documents, PDF files and photos.

...Google Talk mobile application for BlackBerry® smartphones

You can also stay connected your contacts while you're away from your computer with the Google Talk application for BlackBerry® smartphones, offered by BlackBerry®. Just browse to http://www.blackberry.com/GoogleTalk to download the free application...

Google Calendar synchronization tool for BlackBerry® smartphones
mobile calendar sync

With Google Sync for mobile, your BlackBerry® calendar application stays synchronized with your Google Apps calendar. Appointments added or changed online will be reflected on your BlackBerry®, and changes you make on your BlackBerry® will show up in Google Calendar. Just go to http://m.google.com/sync from your BlackBerry® browser to download and install the Google Sync for mobile application...

Google Docs access from mobile browsers

Access and view your Google Docs on your Blackberry®, iPhone®, Windows Mobile phone or other phones which support the Webkit browser...

Update 1/26/2008: More here, with some editorial comments on where this is going ...