The BlackBerry Presenter is designed to wirelessly connect to your Blackberry phone. When used together they provide a lightweight and more portable alternative to a laptop for delivering those “Sales Closing” PowerPoint presentations.
With the Smartphone fast becoming a standard bit of kit for the travelling executive and with BlackBerry devices being amongst the most popular for business users, such an accessory definitely has a place in this market.
BlackBerry Presenter With Blackberry Mobile Phone
I was pleasantly surprised that RIM had taken the time to think about the design and styling of the Blackberry Presenter – its chrome and ebony detailing gives it a feeling of quality. The seamless curves and chrome banding are only broken to reveal a VGA and SVHS output to connect to a projector or monitor, a PAL & NTSC switch for both European and North American compatibility and a USB port, which doubles to facilitate syncing with your Blackberry Presenter desktop application for software updates and also as a power source, as the BlackBerry Presenter does not have an internal battery. Also included in the box is a quick set-up guide, leather pouch to transport your BlackBerry Presenter around in, a USB Data lead, and USB tipped power adaptor with the usual plethora of mains travel adaptors to plug in wherever your final destination may be in the World.
BlackBerry Presenter
BlackBerry Presenter Rear Connection Sockets
Setting up the Blackberry Presenter from out of the box is fairly straight forward and quick. Just a visit to the BlackBerry website to download the desktop software for the computer and the Presenter software for my BlackBerry Torch and it is good to go.
Plug in the power lead and connect the BlackBerry presenter to the projector or monitor, then switch the Presenter on by pressing the LED button on the top, this should then illuminate red to indicate that it is on – a BlackBerry splash is displayed on the presentation screen. You can then open an attachment from your email, however the PowerPoint presentation needs to be downloaded to the phone before the Presenter software will recognise it – with this in mind, it might be a good idea to download the file in good time before the presentation is scheduled to start otherwise your audience can be in for a lengthy delay. Then choose ‘presenter’ from the options menu on your BlackBerry phone; the phone will attempt to connect via Bluetooth to the Presenter device – which has a range of up to 10 metres, but I found I could extend on that quite easily without encountering problems. You will then be requested to enter a pin number, which will be provided on the BlackBerry screen, it is also located on the base of the Presenter. The LED on the Presenter goes from red to blue to confirm that a successful connection has been acquired, after which the first PowerPoint slide displayed on your phone will appear on the presentation screen. Using the touch screen, qwerty keyboard or toggle button of the phone you can then navigate from slide to slide.
The Presenter application has some useful features such as being able to follow your speakernotes on the phone while your audience view the slide. Also there is a feature whereby you can freeze a slide while you search through the presentation to choose another one, therefore allowing you to re-organise in real time the order of your slides. Also you can regain the audience’s attention by using a ‘Blank Screen’ option which will present a solid blue screen. Animations and slide transitions also work well.
Where the Presenter dissapoints is with it’s limited font support, so you may find that the original fonts are not available and are automatically substituted for default ones. Also the Presenter cannot show embedded videos and no sound is possible due to the lack of audio ports.
In conclusion, I find the BlackBerry Presenter can be a useful, portable, lightweight accessory to have with you when travelling to business meetings whereby you might expect to provide a PowerPoint presentation to add a bit of punch to a pitch. “It does what it says on the tin” although for the price you can be forgiven to expect an internal battery, better font support, audio and video compatibility and a better phone application that allows seamless and speedy streaming of PowerPoint slides without the added hassle of downloading files to your phone or internal memory card. If lugging a laptop across the city or country does not appeal, then the BlackBerry Presenter provides a compromised but credible option.
