Blackberry Presenter review

We recently purchased a Blackberry Presenter. Over the past several years I have been on a quest to find an easier way for our presentation teams to setup for presentations quicker and easier (giving them more time to do the presentation itself). I have tried various devices, from projectors with memory card readers to several devices that connect to the projector. The Blackberry Presenter device allows you to connect(wirelessly through Bluetooth) your Blackberry Smartphone to a projector for presentations. This is a really cool concept, as one of the biggest complaints that we get from presentation teams is the amount of time that it takes to setup the laptop, especially when there is a short amount of time for the interview. I had purchased a similar product (Impatica Showmate) a few years ago, but the maximum resolution was 800x600 and for us, not sufficient so it was never deployed. The Blackberry Presenter will allow you to present several different document types, images, and Powerpoint presentations (with transitions) to a projector or other device that supports the resolutions that the Presenter supports. The price tag of the Presenter was $199.

First look - Specs - Requirements
The Blackberry Presenter is small about 3" x 2.5" x 1" and weighs about 6 oz, there is a Blackberry button on the top, and on the side in a cutout is a VGA, SVideo, and Micro USB connection. There is also a switch for PAL/NTSC format. It comes with a leather carrying case as well as a USB cable and power cable. The Presenter will display at 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768 resolutions. Blackberry lists the following smartphone compatibility: Bold 9000 & 9700, Curve 8500 series, Curve 8900, Tour, and Storm. The Blackberry must be running version 4.6+ device software, and have bluetooth enabled.

Setup
Setup if easy if you follow the directions provided. The following steps are required to get rolling with the device. CDs are not included with the device. All software is downloaded from the Blackberry website.

• Install the Blackberry Presenter software on the Blackberry Device
• Update the firmware on the Blackberry Presenter

Using the DeviceTransfer the file that you want to display to your Blackberry. I just use a USB cable and transfer the old fashion way, but I suspect that you could email, bluetooth, bb messenger a file to your device as well.

• Make sure that Bluetooth is running on your Blackberry.
• Open the Blackberry Presenter on the Blackberry. Browse to the file that you want to display (any previously viewed file will show in the opening screen). The file will first load into the Blackberry. It took 60 seconds on mine to load a 28MB powerpoint file. More on file size later.
• Pressing the menu key will give you the option to Present, selecting this option will bring up the available devices. Make sure you can see the Presenter splash screen on the projector/screen because it has a passkey which you will need to connect(your Blackberry) to the device the first time.
• After selecting the Presenter, the first slide will start to be transferred from the Blackberry to the Presenter.
• The menu button gives the user several options such as loop, blank screen, and slide navigation. The user can also use the trackball or space bar to transition between slides/pages.

Supported file typesThe Presenter software will recognize Powerpoint and PDF files. The device will not display image files (in their raw format), video, web pages, etc.
Pros

• The Blackberry is very compact
• For road warriors, this would be an easy alternative to using a laptop for presentations as long as they use simple(small) Powerpoints or pdfs
• Easy, easy connections
• Innovative and sleek design
• Supports most slide transitions
• Device stays cool

Cons

• Large files take a very long time to transfer from the Blackberry to the Presenter. The 28MB file that I transferred earlier took approximately 5 minutes to display the first time. On the second try, it took 1 minute to display the first slide.
• Some images in powerpoints did not display. At this point I'm not sure why.
• Maximum resolution is 1024x768. This can be an issue for wide screen format.
• Does not support display of raw images such as .jpg or output of a screen such as a web page.
• Does not display video files.

SummaryThe Blackberry Presenter is a really cool device if you have simple presentations and small files. For larger presentations that cannot be compressed to a smaller size (2-5MB), the Presenter might not be the best option. It would be nice if you could pre-load the presentation on the Presenter memory directly or if it incorporated a card reader so you could use a micro-SD memory card. It would also be nice to be able to display images directly from the photo browser, this seems like a no brainer to me. I plan to show the presenter to some of the people in our office as an option for presentations.