Review: QuickBubble for BlackBerry

Take a second and think about how many times you’ve found yourself in the middle of something and you realize your forgot to do something else. The problem is you don’t want to necessarily stop what you’re currently doing either. At best, you want to take a brief moment to pause and complete the remembered job. What do you normally do in this case? Put in as little effort as possible; minimize the impact it has on what you really want to do. The same goes for your BlackBerry; you’re busy catching up on Twitter when you need to create a memo. What do you do?

Floating into the scene is QuickBubble. This bubble wants to make your BlackBerry pop with features that include popup shortcuts to key native tools (email, calendar, etc) and popups for incoming email or text messages. Will QuickBubble offer enough pop to stay on top? Will it only end up getting blown away? Let’s take a look.

About QuickBubble

QuickBubble was developed by HandRapid who has also came up with applications such as BBAssistant, TinyLock and ReDialer. In order to use QuickBubble, your BlackBerry should be running OS 4.5 or higher. Recently updated to version 1.2.4, the application has a file size of 120.8 KB.

QuickBubble aims to serve two functions; new message notification and provide shortcuts to creating messages and other content. Through this application you are a couple of clicks away from creating a new contact, calendar entry, note, task or email.

hey! Why can I not select a Coke Zero?!

To access these options, you have to open the menu and select QuickBubble. A popup appears with the previously mentioned options to choose from. From here, you can either scroll left and right through the options, or use the assigned keyboard shortcut (ie: e for email). This I found confusing, as I didn’t see the point for the keyboard shortcuts at all; the popup was small enough to easily scroll. The shortcuts also didn’t work outside of the popup, meaning I have to select QuickBubble from the menu first. According to the setting menu, you should also be able to generate the popup with another keyboard shortcut, which doesn’t work. If I assigned the P key to open QuickBubble, I would instead see “QuickBubble” in the menu change to “P_QuickBubble”. After speaking with QuickBubble, they said this option is only used to help find QuickBubble from the menu list.

Settings Menu

The popups for email, memo and such were easy to manage, just like the native PIM tools. I did have a problem with not being able to access my address book to choose who to send it to- I had to enter the email address in manually.

compose email pop up, you cannot access your address book

QuickBubble also provides popup notification for incoming email and SMS. With email, you can reply, forward, mark as read, delete and preview the message. With SMS, you can simply reply. You are also able to edit your call log using QuickBubble. To access this feature, you need to be on the call log screen. Select QuickBubble and the Log option appears, you can then create a note for a specific call log entry.

Pop!

Conclusion

I hate to burst QuickBubble’s…well, bubble, but I was not a fan of the application initially. At first I wasn’t able to receive email notifications at all, only SMS. They were however extremely quick to respond to concerns as the application was updated twice since I began to review it. A good number of features are not fully utilized, like keyboard shortcuts. I didn’t want to get soap in their eyes, but luckily the developers addressed most of these issues and were able blow a bigger and better bubble. I applaud them for their dedication to customer service. There is a free trial available if you want to try it out for yourself. If you decide to keep it, it’s currently on sale for $5.99 in the CrackBerry App Store.