[rambo47]

I see they have a beta for Blackberrys. I don't know how old it is, but I'm thinking of giving it a shot. Are there any users here who can offer some hands-on reviews?

[DLB]

I had been using AvantGo on my Plam for a few years and started using it on my 7130e over 1 month ago. Works great so far.

DLB

[rambo47]

I had it on a palm Vx and it was super. I tried it on a Treo 600 and the results were mixed. It's a great app for new junkies like me. I'm going to give it a try on my 7105t.

[mobileT3]

You guys should check out the new client that AvantGo released today. Delivered directly to the device and caches your channels just like on Palm OS and Pocket PC. It also has background updates as you would expect on a Blackberry.

[cronos916]

I was using avant go in the pre-wifi days on my first Pocket PC. However with the advances in wifi and Rss Feeds. I havent gone back.

[FightingDevil]

I've been trying to figure out how to install it to my 8700 for 2 days, they're not really clear on whether it's an OTA link or what? I signup go to the download page and then....nothing but an error or a page that doesn't include BB's. If anyone can help, great! If not, than it's thier loss!!

[rambo47]

I've had it for about 5 minutes on my 8100 and it really blows. 2 freezes already, and it looks like a web based new service anyway. Maybe it's only using the web browser to read the cached data, but how can I tell if it keeps freezing? After 2 restarts I'm deleting this piece of sh!t. STAY AWAY.

[harper828]

I've used it on my Palm as well, will wait for the kinks to work out before trying in on BB.

[BikerRick]

I tried it out, and I must admit, it stinks. I've been trying Avantgo on different platforms since they started the service and I haven't liked it on any of them yet. I'm going to start looking at an RSS reader.

[EricGiguere]

Hi everyone, I'm glad to see some of you have been trying our new AvantGo for BlackBerry client on your devices. It's an early beta, so there are a lot of rough edges to it, but things should improve pretty quickly. We've had some issues with the back end infrastructure that are being sorted out right now.

The previous AvantGo for BlackBerry service was an online-only service using the BlackBerry browser. However, the beauty of AvantGo comes from its ability to cache entire channels (websites) locally as well as to display pages formatted specifically for small screens, but the online-only version was missing the much of that experience because of the lag in page fetches. This new version, which works with 3.8 and up, fixes that problem. The background syncing we do ensures that the data you see is always current, too, which brings us more in line with what the average BlackBerry user expects.

I'll post a note later when we have a new version of the client available for download. Feel free to ask me questions in the meantime.

Disclaimer: I'm not an official spokesperson for Sybase iAnywhere. But as the lead developer for this client, I do know a thing or two

[Spankypoo]

Originally Posted by EricGiguere

...as the lead developer for this client, I do know a thing or two

Great.

Do you know why it will only sync about 1 out of every 30 or 40 times I try to? (And once I added any channels to the default ones, it's now gone to 0 out of another 20-30 tries.

Tip: the BB crowd is pretty picky. We don't put up with buggy software as willingly as the Palm crowd (even if it's in beta), so you'll have to do a little better on your next release.

I look forward to it.

[EricGiguere]

It's because there were some back end issues with the server setup, as I explained. In order to not disturb the non-BB users of AvantGo we had to create a separate infrastructure for the BB users to access, but since we'd never done this before there were some problems that we didn't forsee. It was important to us to get the beta out for the CTIA show, so that's what we did. A new client will be available either today or tomorrow that will fix the sync issue -- I'll post a note here when it's ready.

[ihunter]

Originally Posted by EricGiguere

as the lead developer

Eric

Where can I find some info on what the various options do?

[EricGiguere]

You can ask me The options are going to change a bit, as some of them only make sense for the beta. But here's a quick rundown:

1) Servers manager. This is where you specify userid & password, etc. This will be simplified (the ability to set the server host & port will be removed, as will the ability to sync to multiple servers -- that's useful only for the beta).

2) Synchronization. Some interesting things here. Obviously you can set how often you want automatic syncs to occur, but we're going to expand this to let you set a schedule. You can also turn on what we call "smart synchronization", which basically over time determines what your reading habits are and schedules syncs accordingly. The page optimization option lets you do some post-processing on the pages to account for some BlackBerry rendering oddities -- it's slow right now, we're working to speed it up. The connection type will probably disappear, as socket support is very uneven across carriers. The transport type determines how the device connects to the sync server -- in the next version the best transport will be determined automatically.

3) Browser properties. This is very similar to the options you see on the BlackBerry's own browser.

4) Forms manager. When you fill out a form, the form stays queued until you do a sync, although the next version will optionally let you submit the form immediately. This section lets you track those submissions.

5) Online requests manager. Sometimes when using AvantGo you'll come across a "page not found" error. This usually happens because (a) the channel refers to an external page or (b) we had to flush some pages out of memory on the system's request. When you come across a missing page you can do what's called an "online request" to fetch it right away. This manager lets you see the states of those requests. We may remove it, it's not clear how useful it is.

6) Channels. This shows you the channels list. There are some inactive channels in the current beta that shouldn't be there, BTW.

Actually, the channels list reminds me. If you're in AvantGo and you want to quickly jump to a different channel and see which channels have updated themselves since you last read them, press the ALT key and then scroll up or down.

We'd love to get feedback from users on what they like or dislike about AvantGo for the BlackBerry, although I'd ask you to hold off on the comments for a day or two and the new beta client is out for testing.

[ihunter]

Originally Posted by EricGiguere

You can ask me

Thanks for that.

I presume that the Synchronization Frequency options are hours?

[EricGiguere]

Correct. We're revamping those pages, they'll let you control things more finely as to when you want data synced. To start with, we thought approximately once a day would be a good time interval to use, hence the default is 22 hours, plus or minus a random factor (to avoid having too many people syncing at exactly the same time).

[ifonline]

Is the error: "An error occurred during the synchronization process: Incorrect header received" related to the back-end issues you mentioned earlier? I want to try this software, but I can't get anything to work as of yet. I am trying version 0.1 according to the About screen (0.9.8 according to the BB Applications list).

Additionally, why is the AvantGo Launcher still on the device after install? Why have an installation launcher anyway? Can I delete this application now that AvantGo is installed?

Thanks.

[ifonline]

Hm... this time I got the error: "An error occurred during the synchronization process: Invalid userid or network error"

[EricGiguere]

Yes, those errors you're seeing are related to the backend infrastructure. The new client shouldn't have those issues. Note that if you have an invalid userid (and this includes previous AvantGo userids -- you need to create yourself a new userid if you want to try the BB beta, though later we'll also accept existing userids) then you'll get an obscure network error instead of an "invalid userid" error.

The launcher is supposed to be uninstalled, but it isn't always. Yes, you can delete it if you want. The purpose of the launcher is to detect which version of the OS you're using and to automatically do the right thing: if 3.7, launch the online-only version of AvantGo, otherwise if 3.8+ download and install/upgrade the full client. We think this better than having the user download the client and get an obscure "module not found" error on a 3.7 device.

The next client will have proper version numbers listed in all the modules and in the about box so it'll be clear what version you're running. Right now 0.9.8 is the latest public version.

[ifonline]

Thanks for the reply. So I understand... I have a User ID that I created BEFORE downloading the BlackBerry client. I then associated that ID with the client. Is this wrong? Should I create yet another account from within the BlackBerry client? And if yes, do I then need to uninstall the client and start over?