By James Alan Miller
April 6, 2007

The developer who created Naggie, Andrew Zimmer, explained to SmartPhoneToday the 8800 delivers much improved battery life when used with the location-based application than previous BlackBerrys.

Like the BlackBerry Pearl the 8800 is also generally more stylish looking than its predecessor, the 8700 series. And, as with the Pearl, the 8800 loses the traditional BlackBerry scroll-wheel for a trackball navigation system and adds much more extensive support for multimedia than previous RIM devices.

Compatible with GPS-enabled BlackBerrys like the 8800, the $18 application is now on version 2.0. It is also available for the Blackberry 8703e, 7520 and 7100i.

Here's how Naggie works:

If you've ever failed to remember to stop by the grocery store on the way home to pick up a gallon of milk, for example. Or, perhaps, forgotten to grab the milk even though you remembered to make that grocery pit stop a Naggie will not only remind you to pick up the milk, it’ll actually tell you to hit the local market as you drive by the store.

With Naggie, you can set a reminder so the next time you leave the office a popup screen, vibration, message (e-mail, PIN, SMS) or a jingle reminds you to stop at the grocery store, for example. Or set a "buy some apples" reminder that’ll go off the when you pass by the fresh fruit stand. (For more, see our review of Naggie 1.0.)

Naggie is unique because users define locations that are meaningful to them. You can do this in several ways: have the software set the GPS coordinates for your current location (a favorite coffee shop for instance), choose any street in the U.S, selecting almost any city in the world, or basing your reminders on a particular latitude/longitude coordinate.

With version 2.0, Zimmer told SmartPhoneToday security and privacy have been improved. So address lookups are encrypted with industry standard DES encryption. Your current location is never transmitted off the device without explicit permission.

You can also edit GPS locations and remove locations you no longer use, as well as export your location list to share with friend. A feature called NaggieGrams lets you receive a brief e-mail, which is then converted to a Naggie reminder on the BlackBerry. So anyone - subject to your approval, of course - can send you Naggies.

There are also user interface improvements. Zimmer said to SmartPhoneToday Naggie, in general, now behaves more like most other Blackberry applications, in that it understands typical Blackberry gestures. He also added some hotkeys for often-used features, and streamlined all Naggie screens.

In terms of robustness, Zimmer said he's made a lot of improvements to the way Naggie talks to the GPS subsystem. The result is that Naggie gets your location faster and more accurately than before. He's also been able to improve battery performance.

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