I’ve been using Waze for several months now, both the iPad version and the Android version (they are basically the same on both platforms), and have to say I love it.

It uses the power of social media to help you decide the best route to travel by using reports from other Waze users to both calculate your best route and visually show you where the traffic is on a 3d-like map display. The whole concept of using user reports of traffic in real-time is awesome and marrying that to route navigation and calculation sometimes seems like magic. Waze has sent me home on numerous different routes (including ones I never would have thought of on my own) by taking into account user reports of traffic and accidents along the various possible routes.

Waze is free and I highly recommend it.

For $5 the Scanner Radio application available at Blackberry App World is cheap fun! It allows you to listen in to over 2,500 police and fire scanners, railroad communications, and weather radio broadcasts from around the world using your BlackBerry®.

A lot of the radio dialog uses 10 codes, a kind of shorthand you’ve likely heard used on TV shows involving police or fire. A reference to the meanings of these 10 codes can be found at the link here.

Here in Orange County, we’re able to pick up the Orange County Fire radio calls countywide. Unfortunately, police and CHP calls aren’t possible since those are encrypted channels.

The app has a free 7 day trial, so no reason not to give it a try. To get a sense of what will be available to you on your  BlackBerry®, head over to Radio Reference and listen in to those channels that interest you. Both the app and the online Radio Reference site are a great way to get a taste of radio scanning without the expense of actually buying a scanner!

Dropbox lets you put your important files in a folder on your computer and those files will be automatically backed up and synced with all other computers you share the dropbox folder with. The free account permits up to 2 gb of storage, paid accounts allow higher storage levels.

The free account works great for important files, like your Keepass wallet and things like tax returns or other important documents. The service works seamlessly in the background and supports Windows, Mac, iPad and Linux! Recommended.