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Should Your Company Take The Smartphone Challenge?

As a lifelong member of the BlackBerry Nation, I often take for granted the value of my BlackBerry as a business and personal aid. However, I’m sure there are many true believers out there that are not fortunate enough to work for a ‘wireless’ company, and have to make do with a typewriter and an abacus. If that’s the case, you must tell your company about the Smartphone Challenge.

A joint initiative between The Phone Store, RIM, Rackspace Hosting and Sprint, the Smartphone Challenge is an opportunity for companies to get their feet wet with smartphones before making any financial commitments. Here’s the deal: your company gets a 10-day free trial with five Sprint BlackBerrys, full Exchange and BES hosting, and a bunch of free software and other goodies to sweeten the deal. The Phone Store will also host a launch party and training session to make sure everyone is aquainted with their new mobile friends. After the trial period is up, you can either choose to give the devices back or keep them.

Amazingly, the Smartphone Challenge has a 100% success rate. You’ll be hearing more from us about these guys — we always love giving exposure to the true soldiers of the BlackBerry Nation. Until then, check out another picture of the Smartphone Challenge goodie chest, as well as the full press release.

Click here to learn more about the Smartphone Challenge

Gracenote to rock your BlackBerry’s music files

After stumbling on a story about a recent Sony acquisition, I learned about Gracenote, which does a lot of work with digital music files, and apparently plays nice with BlackBerry. Back in the day I used to use Winamp which used Gracenote’s CDDB system to gather up information like album and genre to tack onto my files. You might remember hearing about Sony Ericsson’s TrackID program, which recognizes music that you just hold your phone close to, and is clearly powered by Gracenote. iTunes will be a great converging point for Gracenote and the BlackBerry Bold, but I’m really hopeful to see the other services Gracenote offers, like lyrics lookup, music discovery, and handsfree music navigation. Around CES time, it sounded like RIM was being troublesome about getting the service onto BlackBerrys, but I think it’s safe to say everyone would love to have this software preloaded on every device.