I want my BlackBerry to be my computer. Not my desktop, not my laptop, my BlackBerry. I want to walk through airports, along city streets and crowded subways with my computer in my pocket. Not hanging from my shoulder in a heavy bag, making every movement feel awkward, weighing me down with something I have to protect, something that will ruffle my clothes and make me look out of breath when I arrive, but a computer that disappears into a pocket when I need it to. I want to walk, talk, and look free, but connected. 

It’s a dream shared by anyone who owns a smartphone and each year the wireless industry takes incremental steps towards realizing it. This year, Research In Motion has pounced on presentations. They’re already on your BlackBerry, you’ve e-mailed them there for safe-keeping. You can view them, you can edit them, and if you could simply connect your BlackBerry to a projector you wouldn’t need a laptop. You could simply walk into a board room with nothing more than a clean suit, a friendly demeanor, and your phone.

The Presenter is a wireless accessory. It connects to the big screen while your BlackBerry sends it slides via Bluetooth, leaving you free to walk about the room while you use the BlackBerry itself as a controller. The idea isn’t just to leave your laptop at home, but to make your presentations more dynamic.

The device itself is small, just three and a half inches wide, and easy to tuck out of view. It uses an AC adaptor, no battery, and connects to a display system either through a VGA (1024 x 768) or S-Video cable (640 x 480), both sold separately. A small, hidden switch lets you choose between NTSC or PAL television standards.

This means that the Presenter can be used with a projector or a television, both here in North America or abroad, but without support for audio can’t be used with presentations that include narration, music, or video.

It has one large power button and a circular LED ring that emits different colours and flashes to display its status – red for power, blue for connections, and purple when things go wrong, in which case you’ll need to check for messages on the presentation screen or on your BlackBerry.

It will only work with a BlackBerry running Device Software 4.6 or later and RIM’s new BlackBerry Presenter App, a simple piece of software to manage the process. It will only display Microsoft PowerPoint files, both .ppt an .pptx, and PowerPoint files only. No photo slideshows, or any other image generated by your BlackBerry.

You begin by first opening a PowerPoint file. It can be an attachment in an e-mail or calendar entry, or a file you browse and locate on a memory card. Once open, you click the menu key and select “Present”, an option added with the installation of the Presenter app.

A connection is initiated with the Presenter which displays the passkey both on the television or projector it’s connected to and the Bluetooth Id it broadcasts when discoverable. An odd choice, I guess it’s more about convenience than security.

Once connected your BlackBerry then begins to feed the entire set of presentation slides to the Presenter, which stores it all into its temporary memory. There’s no listing for how much internal memory is available, but depending on the size of your PowerPoint file this is a process that can take several minutes, sometimes longer, enough to force you to make small talk with your audience as you wait.

Unfortunately there’s no way to load the slides onto the Presenter in advance or to save them permanently for repeated use. Once you unplug the Presenter or select “End Show” you’ll need to load the files all over again to run them another time. Thankfully, as it loads each of the slides one by one, it only displays the first slide on the screen, keeping the rest a secret.

Once complete the BlackBerry merely serves to send commands. You can flick the trackball or touchscreen back-and-forwards to change slides or click the menu key to pause, bring up a blank screen, or advance to specific slide by its number. You can turn on your speaker notes, which will only appear on your BlackBerry’s mobile screen, and set the presentation to loop at different timed intervals.

I found these controls a little awkward to pull up and use on-the-fly. My hope is that a future version of the software will include on-screen controls that will reduce a step. It defeats the point of walking about the room if you have to stop and concentrate on your mobile screen for a few moments just to make a quick change.

I’ve also come across a glitch. If you set the slideshow to loop and then forget to choose “End Show” to stop it before any other option, the Presenter will loop endlessly and uncontrollably. The only way to fix it is to reboot it and load the slides all over again.

The software supports most, but not all transitions, animations, and elements used by Microsoft in PowerPoint. I generated a number of quick presentations using a variety of features and in every case there was a chart, a photograph, or a transition that went missing after I transferred the file to my BlackBerry.

This means you’ll need to preview your PowerPoint files on your BlackBerry and edit them on your computer afterwards to make sure that all of the slideshow elements will carry over. Sometimes you simply don’t have that much time to prepare or find yourself under pressure to add last-minute changes and you need to know that what you create on your computer is what you’ll see on the Presenter.

Other limitations include an incompatibility with either the BlackBerry Curve 8300 or BlackBerry Flip 8200 handsets and a lack of support for Macs. Although you can run the Presenter using RIM’s app, to apply future upgrades to the device, you will need to connect it to a PC through USB and run the BlackBerry Presenter Upgrade Manager, only available for Windows machines.

There are many companies developing ways to allow smartphones to deliver presentations. Some are creating pocket projectors, others Apps that turn your handset into a wireless remote. Research In Motion certainly has the right idea, is chasing the right dream, but their BlackBerry Presenter is typical of many firsts in that it works as a proof of concept, but still needs a great deal of polish.

I’d like to see a model that can display slides the same way as they appear on a laptop, with support for multimedia content and plain old photo slideshows. I’d like to see a better mobile interface and an option for storing files on the device itself to eliminate loading times at the venue. If RIM can fix those issues, then presenters, speakers, and pitch experts can really start leaving their laptops at home.

 

 

Note: This is an advance review. Research In Motion has not set a release date for the BlackBerry Presenter, but assures that it will be sold through ShopBlackBerry.com and select stores for $199.