Berry Pix Review

I love putting pictures on my BlackBerry. It’s a great way to take photographs of my family along when I’m on the road. I’ve recently reviewed Ascendo Photos for BlackBerry and I was very pleased with its capabilities. So when I got a chance to review Berry Pix, I was very excited to give it a try.

Berry Pix by Collaborative Network Technologies is software for loading and viewing pictures on your BlackBerry. It comes with a PC component that integrates with the RIM Desktop Manager to load new pictures onto your device using your data cable. The desktop component lets you stretch, rotate, mirror and crop your photos before loading them to the handheld.

Installing Berry Pix is a multi-step process; there is the BlackBerry application, the desktop application, and an integration step to link the desktop component to the RIM Desktop Manager. The software comes with a PDF User’s Manual that walks you through the steps. While installation isn’t difficult, reading the manual is a must to insure that the desktop component is properly configured with the RIM Desktop Manager. Fortunately, the manual is well written with plenty of screenshots to keep you on track.

The desktop component is easy to use. After you import a picture from your hard drive, you can preview what it will look like on the device before you load it. You can click and drag your mouse on the picture to crop it, and there are a few image manipulation functions for rotating and mirroring. After you’ve loaded several pictures, close the desktop application and the pictures are synchronized with your device.

You can load up multiple pictures to send to your BlackBerry, but only the most recent is displayed. I couldn’t find a reference to previous pictures that I had imported during that session. But after closing the app, all the pictures I had loaded were sent over. Once you know this, it isn’t a big deal, but I’d prefer to see a list of everything that I’ve sent or am about to send for that session.

The crop feature on the desktop component was a little slow to respond. If I clicked and dragged to select an area of the picture, it would only work if I did it slowly. If I dragged too quickly, it would get confused about the area I was trying to select. But again, once you understand how it works, it’s easy to use, and very useful. Because the BlackBerry screen size is so small, it’s often necessary to crop your pictures to get a meaningful image.

On the BlackBerry, Berry Pix looks very stylish. After launching the application, you will see thumbnails of the images you have loaded in a neat little grid layout. This makes it easy to browse and find particular pictures. There are settings to control the transition effects and time interval between pictures in a slide show. You can choose between 5 and 60 seconds for a time interval and any one of the 6 transition effects, which really look great. I set mine to random so I could see them all. You can also control the time delay for the screen saver, or turn it off entirely.

Berry Pix is a solid application with a reasonable price tag and I’m happy to have it on my BlackBerry.

## This Article Was Originally Published by AllBlackBerry.com