Since switching to an Android phone, the one application I really miss from my BlackBerry days is Poynt. Like other navigation apps such as Yelp, Poynt offers a variety of services- rating restaurants through OpenTable, finding events and venues in your proximity via superPages and CitySearch, and even providing you with directions to the location of your choice. I don’t know what it is, exactly, about Poynt that makes it so appealing, but here is an example of how amazingly it works. I was in the car with my sister in Chicago, and we were driving my niece to her first ballet class. We turned onto Ashland Ave. and my sister realized she remembered neither the directions to the school nor the name of the school. Cue Poynt. I clicked on the “Business” tab in my app, input “ballet” and immediately, the very first hit was the school in question. Pretty cool. See, unlike Yelp, Poynt uses some of the Internet’s most popular databases to compile its information. It would be great if you could save searches on Poynt, though. You can close, and then reopen the application and see your results, but once you do a new search, all the old information is lost. Even so, this is one of the best apps I’ve ever used, and I really do recommend it to everyone, whether they ask me or not.   Less

My coworkers at Viaero and I have wanted to review this game for a long time. Okay, so WordMole isn’t actually an application- it’s just a game that’s preloaded onto newer BlackBerry phones, but we like it so much that we’re going to include it here. Most of us have probably wasted more of the day than we’d like to admit playing it, but, that being said, here is the critique: there is nothing more frustrating than coming up with a great word only to have it rejected by WordMole’s very limited dictionary. “Joust,” “lusty,”- these are the only two words I can think of off the top of my head that were rejected, but it happens fairly often. But if you ignore that failing, WordMole is a great game. It strengthens your vocabulary, and your spelling (unless you spell a real word it doesn’t recognize), and there is even some strategy involved in picking which letters to use for your word. It’s easy to lose yourself in this very fun word game, but I comfort myself with the thought that I’m playing something educational.   Less

Whenever I’m playing Scrabble a little competitively with my friends, it’s nice to have some proof that my opponent’s 50-point word isn’t actually a real word. Well, if you use Dictionary.com as your reference, you’re not likely to make many points, either. Oddly enough, even though the application was created by the popular reference website, there are lots of words you can find on the website that just never made it into the app. Graham Greene fans will know the word “glabrous” but Dictionary.com for BlackBerry doesn’t. “Descant,” meaning to expound upon a theory, and “aphonous” (easy to define based on the root) are also not available on this app, though strangely, “descant” has not one but four definitions on the website. Why the limitation? If you really need a reference app that defines all real words, cough up and buy a dictionary app. But for the casual, unsophisticated etymologist, Dictionary.com for BlackBerry is good enough.   Less

This very addictive puzzle game earns its stars by being fun, in spite of being a knockoff of other, better-known games like Bejeweled. Pop bubbles by lining them up by color. It’s a simple concept, and this free version comes with three difficulty levels. But if these levels begin to bore you, you will have to upgrade to the paid version, which is pretty accessible at only $.99.   Less

Stream live Internet broadcasts of ESPN radio with this handy application for BlackBerry. Since this is not a free app, there are a few things to consider. First, this application has a reputation of being buggy, or not working right. Complaints from no audio to connection errors abound in reviews on the BlackBerry App World site, but if you find that you absolutely must send text messages to your favorite ESPN studio, or listen, OnDemand to SportsCenter, a $2.99 download isn’t so steep.    Less