Extending the Blackberry - Financial Services, Lookup and News

Financial

The Financial Services area of the PocketGenie, shown in Figure 14-5, gives you a place to view your online portfolio and gather all kinds of financial information and news. If you are watching the stock market and keeping up with events in the financial world, this feature of the PocketGenie should prove useful. Here you can also find information about different companies, use a handy currency converter, and access a number of related financial news and services.

Figure 14-4 Select the item you want.

Figure 14-5 Financial Services

The Lookup feature of the PocketGenie is a handy tool that finds different kinds of information on the Internet for you. For example, do you need to find an area code for a certain city? No problem—let Lookup find it for you. How about a phone number or e-mail address? How about the Yellow Pages? The Lookup options screen, shown in Figure 14-6, gives you a quick way to find the information you need. Note that not all of these services are free, but the Lookup screen lets you know what’s free and what’s not.

You can use the PocketGenie to easily keep up with what is going on in the world around you. The News area of the browser gives you access to all kinds of news items, including top stories, business headlines, entertainment headlines, and a host of others, as shown in Figure 14-7. Just click the item you want, and the PocketGenie will pull the information from the Internet for you.

Figure 14-6 Lookup feature

Office

The Office feature of the PocketGenie, which I find very helpful, gives you access to several quick tools that use the Internet in order to find the information you need. For example, do you need to find the spelling of a word or create a document you can fax? You can do these things and much more using the PocketGenie’s Office tools. The available tools, which are shown in Figure 14-8, all function in the same basic manner—you input some information, and the PocketGenie uses the Internet to retrieve the answers for you. In the case of faxing, you simply enter a phone number or e-mail address and type the fax you want to send. You can even check on packages that are currently in the shipment process at major providers such as Airborne Express, DHL, FedEx, and others.

The PG Store provides you with access to a few shopping sites, such as Flowershop.com, movie tickets, online auctions, and related shopping options. You can also browse other online stores by simply requesting a URL, which you’ll explore a little later in this chapter in “Using the Pocket Internet.”

The Sports section of the PocketGenie works just like Entertainment and News. After clicking the Sports icon on the PocketGenie Home screen (the first icon in the bottom row), you are given a list of categories, as shown in Figure 14-9. To view a category, just click the category you want to see, and the sports information will be downloaded to your BlackBerry from the Internet.

Figure 14-7 PocketGenie News

Figure 14-8 Office features

Travel

Use the power of the Internet to check flight listings and flight status with the Travel option. You can get directions to the airport and use the currency converter and translator tools here as well.

Using the Internet, the PocketGenie can find the weather for your area or for any city and state (or ZIP code). Just enter the information, and you’ll get a weather report back in seconds.

Figure 14-9 Sports features

Finally, if you are having problems with PocketGenie, the Support section gives you quick tips and instructions, or you can ask for help using WolfeTech support. The options provided here are self-explanatory.

This chapter is from How to Do Everything with Your Blackberry, by Curt Simmons (McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2004, ISBN: 0072255870). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now.

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