FastForward is a program that makes it easy to have phone calls to your Blackberry forwarded to numbers of your choosing based on your schedule. One great use is to have all calls forwarded to your home after work hours and on the weekend to save money on the cell phone bill. However, do you really need a program to setup forwarding rules when you can do that directly through your carrier? We had a chance to play with it and our thoughts are below.
With FastForward you need to make sure you have call forwarding on you plan and you need to have it working properly or else the program won’t work. Starting up the program we are brought to a blank screen where we are asked to put in our first forwarding rule. The process is easy, much easier than doing it through the cellphone and punching in a bunch of numbers. Setting up forwarding rules is straight forward, enter the number that you want to be forward and then set a time frame. You can do this for an unlimited number of phone numbers but one downside is that you can only setup one forward number. So there’s no way to setup different numbers to forward calls to depending on if you family calls or a coworker. We’re guessing this is a limitation of the phone carrier and not something the developers overlooked.
Enabling and disabling forwarding rules are simple aswell, you can either enable/disable all rules or selectively enable/disable one rule at a time. One great feature is that you can disable or enable all rules if your headset is connected. The program assumes that you want to take calls when your headset is connected, which makes perfect sense. We didn’t try if this setting worked with a Bluetooth headset. Different forwarding rules can also be setup for when the Blackberry is charging.
One major downside with setting up forwarding rules through FastForward instead of directly through your carrier is that the rules will only work when your device is on, unlike with the carrier. However, like a lot of Blackberry users we know, it is rare that we turn off our Blackberrys or let the battery run out. So for users that need to take ultimate control over call forwarding rules this program is very attractive but it won’t be for everyone.
Fastforward retails for $11.95 on Neon Toad: http://www.neontoad.com
A trial is also available for download through Neon Toad: http://www.neontoad.com
View screenshots on the following pages …
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