Tested on a Blackberry Bold 9700 running OS v5.0.0.545

Being a Blackberry owner I sometimes feel like I’m being ignored by mobile app developers, with the iPhone and Android stealing all the limelight. However, Dropbox announced a limited beta yesterday (first 500 users, later extended to 1,000) and I managed to quickly nab myself a download. A small download and a quick install later and I had it running in practically no time. I was presented with a nice splash screen and prompted to enter my Dropbox account details, after doing so I was fully setup and ready to start using the app.

First Impressions

On the home screen you’re instantly presented with all the files and folder within the root directory of your Dropbox folder. The first thing I noticed is that the interface is really sleek. Like, really sleek. It has a very “iPhone” look and feel, with big icons and well spaced lines for each item; not something you normally see on a Blackberry. Each folder type has it’s own instantly identifiable icon, and each file has a nice icon similar to what I’d expect to see on my desktop computer, and not on a phone.  When you go to open a folder a spinning loading indicator pops up as it loads the directory. On one occasion, for whatever unknown reason, the indicator kept spinning but it didn’t seem to be loading anything (I assume a bad internet connection) but, and this is something I’ve never seen done on any Blackberry app (native or otherwise), I was able to backup out of the loading process. No hanging, no delay, just the ability to instantly cancel loading. Straight away this is a big thumbs up in my book.

Good Points

Here are some interface touches and other features that I really liked:

  • The photo viewer works well, and allows you to slide through a photo folder and download each file on the fly
  • Ability to upload photos directly from the camera or from files already on the phone
  • The .doc and .txt viewers work well (though I have a minor bad point about the .txt viewer that I’ll come to later)
  • The downloader dialog is nice and shows file progress

Bad Points

I want to qualify these bad points first by saying that this is a Beta app, it’s free and as far as apps go for Blackberry, this has one of the smoothest User Experiences I’ve ever had. But, nevertheless, here’s what I noticed:

  • It will not download files that it can’t open, and there’s no way to make it.
  • It doesn’t like PDF files either, it will download these but when it tries to open them it gives an error. Though this could well be a problem with the Blackberry itself, which has other problems with PDF files.
  • On 3 tests of the search functionality, I searched for files I knew existed, but once got an error, once got no results and only once got the correct results. It took around 40 seconds to find the files (For reference, I have about 2GB worth of files in my Dropbox)

EDIT (11/08/2010): I updated to OS v5.0.0.656 and was unable to recreate these errors when searching. I can’t say whether the update fixed the problem or not as I only experienced it the first time I used it.

  • The .txt viewer acts strangely. Only about 3/4 of the screen real estate is used, and no scrollbar is shown, but regardless of that it is still usable and I can see it becoming very useful.
  • Where are the files going? I didn’t set a download location, and there isn’t any functionality to set it, so I have no idea where the files I download save to.

In Summary

This is a great app from Dropbox, and my negative points really are a lot of nitpicking. This is definitely one of the best apps I’ve seen for Blackberry (alot of apps have a reputation for being buggy and poorly maintained) and I’m astounded it works so well on it’s first Beta release. Hopefully Blackberry will start to get more love from app developers one day, but I think more of the phones features need to be made available for developers to play with first. I’m sure I’ll get great value from this app, so many thanks to the Dropbox team!

You may have to wait a bit before you can get your hands on this app if you missed the Beta, but in the meantime, give Dropbox a try if you haven’t already.

Or you could use my referral link and net us both 250MB of extra space for free!