I just bought a Blackberry Pearl 8120 (has wi-fi), which I love. This may be the perfect phone (for me). The keyboard is not a full one, but I can still type faster and more accurately than I could on my Treo or my wife’s MotoQ. Remember the Milk now offers a Blackberry sync, which works very well, as does Google Sync for my calendar.

But I can’t find anything for my contacts. I get a 502: Bad Gateway error when trying to access m.plaxo.com, and Plaxo is agonizingly slow to release a sync tool for Blackberries (which is dumb, since they are still the most popular handheld).

And although I can boot into Windows and sync from Outlook once in a while, I don’t want to.

So does anyone know of a good online contact manager that offers an over-the-air Blackberry sync, plus a sync to one of the following?

• Thunderbird
• Plaxo
• Gmail

Oh, and I already know about ScheduleWorld/Funambol, but it is ugly and clunky and a pain in the arse, and I won’t use it unless there is no good alternative.

If you have read much of this blog, you know I have a major obsession with time tracking options. I have tried a variety of options, including Time Matters, Time59 (online), GnoTime, BK Task Timer, TTime, and many more.

All are lacking something. Most are too complicated. Tracking time is an inherently simple thing. All you need is the date, a description, and the time billed. If you have more people in the office, it can be nice to automate the assignment of different rates, but it is just as easy to generate individual time sheets for each employee.

In the end, I have decided to go with a comparatively low-tech solution: spread sheets. Spread sheets are platform-independent, have little or no learning curve (great for new or contract employees), and are far easier to view and edit. Mine automatically computes the total charges billed to date, so it actually takes less time to generate a bill than with a comprehensive package like Time/Billing Matters.

The only thing it doesn’t do is have a timer. In Windows, TTime is an elegant solution. Online timer Toggl is another good solution. Stopwatch works fine in Linux, and I’m sure there are a lot of other options (in addition to just writing down start and end times).

This is a reminder that although technology allows us to do a lot of complicated things, complicated is not always better, particularly for a simple task like tracking time.

One of the problems with using Outlook to manage e-mail is that there is no easy way to manage attachments. Outlook is not a good place to store attachments. Outlook basically rolls all your information–e-mails, attachments, tasks, appointments, and contacts, into one .pst file. So the more attachments, the more data Outlook has to manage, and the slower it runs. I’ve heard that if your .pst file gets above 1 GB, Outlook borders on unusable. I’m not there yet.

You can remove attachments (after saving them to your client file, of course) one at a time, but this is tedious and inefficient.

There are a slew of add-on programs to help with this. Can anyone recommend a few to try to start? If not, I am going to start plowing through them, one by one.