December 31st is here which means it is time to officially announce the winners in our CrackBerry.com Best of 2009 Awards. The voting concluded at midnight last night and we dropped audible word of the winners in our 2009 Year End Podcast this morning. Below you'll find the winners in each category accompanied with their award graphic (the winners can feel free to use the graphics on their sites!). We'll follow up soon with a full breakdown of the voting results (takes a while to chop the images out from the system and turn them into an article) but we made a couple of runner-up notes here and there where the race was tight and you can listen to the podcast for more details of how things unfolded until we get the follow-up post live.

Huge Congratulations go to the winners and all of the nominees. 2009 was a great year for BlackBerry and we can't wait to see what will be nominated in the 2010 CBAs.  

Cast Your Votes on the Polls Below! Polls Close @ Midnight!

* Update: December 30th - LAST DAY TO VOTE! The polls close tonight at midnight. *

Following up on our announcement of the nominees for the Best of 2009 CrackBerry Awards, or CBAs as we like to call them, the time has come for the CrackBerry Community to place their votes! Below you'll find outstanding nominees to vote on in a bunch of different categories. We had to draw the line somewhere, so went for major categories falling under BlackBerry Accessories, Apps and Devices. This is already a big jump up from our 2008 awards and we've left some room to grow for 2010.

Place your votes below! If there's a category that doesn't feel relevant to you personally or you don't have a clue who to vote for, feel free to skip on to the next category that floats your boat (err.. makes your BlackBerry vibrate?!). Note - I'm going to disable the comments on this post. Want to keep things on track to voting - there was plenty of discusion on the nominees post and they're will be plenty more once the winners are announced!

The voting will close end of day on December 30th, and we'll be announcing the deserving winners here on the blogs on New Year's Eve. From there, as we kick off 2010 we'll follow up in more detail on each of the winners to make sure we start the new year off right, by looking back at the best of 2009. Congratulations and good luck to all of the nominees! Happy voting everyone!

Here's one for all of our loyal CrackBerry readers and members out there... a new and improved CrackBerry.com web launcher! Our pal Fabian Heuwieser whipped up the new launcher as a little holiday gift for CrackBerry Nation. This isn't just a shortcut to the mobile site though - what Fabian built is a BlackBerry app that essentially mimics our entire site navigation. From within the application you can decide exactly where you want to go, and from there click the appropriate link that will open your web browser and take you directly to that page/section on the CrackBerry.com mobile site. It's basic and it works GREAT.

You can download the CrackBerry.com launcher by visiting crackberry.com/getlauncher from either your BlackBerry's web browser or on your computer (and send yourself the download link). This is the first version that has gone public, so if you run into any issues or have any suggestions you can leave them on this CrackBerry Launcher forum thread. Note to BlackBerry Storm owners: Be sure to disable compatiblity mode!

So what are you waiting for? Go download it now and get your CrackBerry on!! Thanks Fabian!

• Download the new CrackBerry.com Launcher for free >>

Its that time again! The year is almost over, and in true CrackBerry fashion we're heading out with a bang. Last year we picked the Best of 2008 with our Cracky Awards in various categories, and this year we have tons of great apps, accessories, devices and more to choose for our Best of 2009. 

Before the official voting begins Wednesday, we need you, the CrackBerry Nation, to help make sure we have all the of the categories you want to vote on and to make sure we have all of the deserving nominees in there. Below you'll find a list compiled by the Crack Team of what we think is fitting for this year's CBAs. But we're not perfect and we may have missed some worthy nominees or not come up with some categories that could be fun vote on. That said, you can drop a comment on this post and let us know if you think we missed anything. Do we need to add a nominee or two to a category? Maybe there's room for a whole new category? LET US KNOW TODAY. We'll be launching the community voting tomorrow so you need to get your thoughts to us asap (don't cast your votes in the comments here... this is all about categories and nominees). Note: we decided to bypass including BlackBerry themes or theme developers in the polls since there are just way to many to choose from, but in the coming weeks we'll be starting a new weekly theme roundup to highlight the greatest free and premium themes throughout the year. Check out the Best of 2009 preliminary award categories and nominees below!

Happy Thanksgiving to the CrackBerry Nation. I'll be off eating my way through the day with my family, and hope you all will be doing the same. Its not often that I have an excuse to eat more than one dinner and double dessert, so I take full advantage of the holiday. If you can handle it, try to put the Berry (or Berry's) away for a bit and spend some time with family and friends. Don't worry - we'll still be here tomorrow when you get back, so a day away from us won't kill you :-)

At the 2009 BlackBerry Developer Conference it was made clear on more than one occasion that to build better BlackBerry apps and maximize your app's awareness (and downloads/sales) you need to embrace all delivery channels (App World, Mobihand, etc.) and especially engage BlackBerry enthusiast sites such as CrackBerry.com.

During one DevCon session in particular, mention was made of a free service we offer here at CrackBerry that not all developers were aware of but encouraged to take advantage of, and that is getting your own dedicated forum within our CrackBerry forums. The BlackBerry Software and Service Companies forum is the place for developers to maintain a presence and reach out to our enthusiast community. Read on for more details!

Halloween is creeping up on us rather fast and what better time than now to get in the spirit of things and dress up your BlackBerry to have a little fun. If themes are what you are looking for the CrackBerry App Store and forums are full of free and premium themes for all devices. Wanna scary or just festive wallpaper for your device? Be sure to check out the Crackberry wallpaper gallery and pick something you like. And finally, we cannot forget Halloween ringtones to give your BlackBerry a ghoulish ring. Check out all the things for Halloween and happy haunting!

Mac user? If so, we know you're tapping your feet waiting to for RIM to officially release Desktop Manager for Mac (which is supposedly going to happen on October 2nd, 2009). In the meantime, while we're waiting for some BlackBerry Mac love we thought we'd drop a little CrackBerry Mac love. 

Courtesy of CrackBerry reader Mathew Sechler, you can now download the free CrackBerry.com Widget for Mac! I know a lot you hardcore Mac users / CB readers simply keep CrackBerry.com open in a browser tab all day long (and you can still do that!) when you're at work or at home in the evening (and you're on the site from your BlackBerry when it between!), but the CrackBerry widget makes it easy for the rest of you to stay connected from your Dashboard. Within the widget, you can choose between the blogs, forums and store feeds so you'll always know what's new in the world of CrackBerry. You can grab it from the link below. Big thanks to Mathew for this. Enjoy it Mac users!!

• Download the CrackBerry.com Widget for your Mac >>

For a long time now we've had a twitter account for this site, but to date if you have been a follower of twitter.com/crackberry about the only thing that gets tweeted are the article titles/links that are posted here in the blogs. The other week when I logged into the account I saw that in addition to a ton of people re-tweeting those headlines, that many people ask questions to @crackberry which to date have gone largely ignored.... that is until now.

Introducing @crackberry twelpers! Borrowing from Best Buy's idea of a TwelpForce, we've given access to our @crackberry twitter account to some active and knowledgeable (and willing!) members of the CrackBerry community. Their mission? To answer all those BlackBerry-related questions that come to us on twitter. As best as they can, they'll either answer directly (in as few characters as possible) or find the link on CrackBerry that has the answer you're looking for.

We had an overwhelming amount of members offer to be a @crackberrry twelper (thank you!) and plan to grow the team with time, but in the beginning will be starting with the core group below. They'll sign off their @crackberry twelp tweets with a short signature so you know who's helping you, and can also find them on the forums and follow their own accounts on twitter:

@crackberry Twelpers starting lineup...

Once we work out the initial kinks that are bound to happen on this kind of endeavor and gauge the demand, we plan to increase the twelper team in size - so please keep posting on the forums and express your interest to twelp here. And if you have questions, be sure to follow @crackberry on twitter and ask!

• Question for the twelpers? Follow @crackberry on twitter and ask! >>

Happy Sunday! Hopefully you've had a good weekend so far. It was a busy week at CrackBerry with contests and a big app sale, so we just wanted to give a friendly reminder of what's going on so you don't miss out. The BlackBerry MobileHeist ends tomorrow and is offering up 15 new and popular apps for your BlackBerry at 50% off. We also posted a a bunch of contests throughout the week which all end tonight at midnight PST. To enter those, simply follow the links below and leave a comment on each respective post. Good luck!

CrackBerry Contests Ending tonight:

• 250 Free Copies of BerryBuzz >>
• 50 Free Unlock Codes for the Verizon Tour >>
• 100 Free Copies of ZenMinder >>
• 20 Free Copies of MindBerry >>
• 50 Free Unlock Codes for Verizon / Bell / Telus Tour >>

Another week, another contest. The news has been run over with all things Tour this week, but we need to take a quick break to announce the results of our Win A Free Copy Of PaderSyncFM! and ShortcutMe Gets an Update - 50 Free Copies contests. If you didn't win this time, check out our 250 Free Copies of BerryBuzz 2.0 contest and try your luck. Congratulations to all the winners!

I'll keep this short and sweet. The BlackBerry Tour is now available for sale from Verizon and Sprint with other carriers coming online soon, but there's one lucky member of CrackBerry Nation who won't have to buy one. The Grand Prize winner in our Win a BlackBerry Tour courtesy of CrackBerry.com Contest is:

jsanta11

We also had three runner-up prizes of $150 in accessories from ShopCrackBerry.com. The lucky winners here are: 

christiankim83, bradfordjohnson, and Gimik

Congrats to the winners! I'll be emailing you personally later today to arrange your prizes. And to everybody else..don't worry. At CrackBerry.com another contest is always just around the corner. In fact, you can still win a BlackBerry Tour via my Follow @crackberrykevin on Twitter contest. Details Here. 

Twitter. Some of you like it, some of you hate it and some of you are as addicted to it as you are your BlackBerry (gasp!). While we mainly use our @crackberry twitter account for CrackBerry blog post headlines or special event coverage, I tend to use my personal @crackberrykevin account to highlight the BIG stories, share my thoughts here and there on various things, to poll the community for advice and to give away free stuff! So on the topic of giving away free stuff via twitter, I've dreamed up our ongoing twitter contest (I feel bad that there were no Storm 2 in June Contest winners!).

Ongoing Twitter Contest: All you need to do is follow @crackberrykevin on twitter.  Every time I add 1,000 new followers, I'll give away some free BlackBerry apps or themes. And every time I add 5,000 new followers, I'll also give away some BlackBerry accessories (cases, headsets, etc.). AND when I hit 25,000 followers, I'll give away a new BlackBerry smartphone to a lucky follower! And this will be ongoing... keep following, keep re-tweeting and you'll keep having more and more chances to win.  

*Update - Save on SmrtGuard! - If you didn't win a free copy, the good folks at SmrtGuard have set CrackBerry readers up with a 10% off discount to purchase. Just FOLLOW THIS LINK! *

Last week to celebrate both Canada Day and Independence Day we held a contest for one of CrackBerry Nation's favorite apps / utilities / services, SmrtGuard. The results are in, and 100 lucky members can enjoy the week that much more now. Winners will receive a full year subscription to SmrtGuard (an awesome $45 value). Thanks to everyone that entered, and congrats to all the winners! And if you didn't win, don't worry... you know another CrackBerry contest is just around the corner (have you entered in our Win a BlackBerry Tour contest yet??).