RIM execs on best BlackBerry apps: 8 downloads

CIO - Over the past few months, we've given you "Six Free BlackBerry Downloads You Don't Want to Miss" and "Six (More) Free BlackBerry Apps You Don't Want to Miss" -- and even offered up seven great downloads for Windows Mobile users. This week, on a quest to learn more about the best BlackBerry applications out there, we went directly to the source: Research In Motion Ltd.'s executives. These guys know BlackBerries, and they spoke with us at RIM's 7th annual Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES) in Orlando.

We asked Jeff McDowell, vice president of global alliances; David Heit, director of software product management; and RIM President and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis about their favorite third-party BlackBerry downloads, and each executive had some interesting suggestions.

The following eight downloads, many of which are available for free, are the apps that these three RIM executives find most valuable and use the most frequently.

TeleNav and Garmin GPS for BlackBerry

Like many executives, Heit is frequently on the move, but he rarely goes anywhere without his BlackBerry. Global Positioning System-based apps such as TeleNav Inc.'s GPS Navigator for BlackBerry and Garmin for BlackBerry help him get where he needs to be on time and as painlessly as possible.

TeleNav's GPS Navigator offers users a choice of voice or on-screen driving directions. It can also help you find and navigate to nearby restaurants, Wi-Fi hot spots or any other of the company's 10 million business listings. And TeleNav provides traffic alerts and rerouting information based on those notifications. (For related coverage, check out our review of TeleNav's mobile workforce management product, TeleNav Track.)

Like TeleNav, Garmin Mobile for BlackBerry offers voice or text turn-by-turn navigation throughout North America. It also has some 6 million "points of interest," or preprogrammed locales of note. And the Garmin Online service provides traffic information, weather forecasts, local gas prices and more.

Both services are compatible with a variety of BlackBerry devices, including Pearl, Curve and 8800-series handhelds, and they can be combined with an external GPS "puck" to enable devices without built-in GPS functionality to utilize the service.

Users with internal GPS pay $99 for access to Garmin Mobile for BlackBerry (that covers you for the life of the device) and $99 per year for TeleNav GPS Navigator. And folks without GPS can pay an additional $50 for a puck from Garmin Ltd. or $99.99 from TeleNav.

Pocket Express

Though McDowell was careful too stress the fact that he didn't want to play favorites -- he is, after all, a vice president of RIM's global alliances business, which fosters relationships with the developers and vendors who create and market BlackBerry applications -- he did offer up a few of the downloads that he uses on a regular basis.