No luck

Following the posting of the December 13th, 2009 blog entry, 'QR codes to hit the U.S.?', a comment suggested trying out UpCode. So this blogger wandered over to www.upcode.fi to download the software. His Blackberry was not detected. After manually picking Blackberry, was presented with a list of models - 4.2, 4.6, to 4.7... Well the Bold 9700 has a 5.x O.S. which wasn't a choice, so tried 4.7. Received a browser "invalid address" error message. Tried again, entering 5.0 in the third box, but got another "invalid address" browser error message.


Navigated to a page that listed the models of phones supported, which included numerous models... They appear to have Symbian and Java versions. Attempted to download UpCode Java, but that failed with a "909 error", so fell back to UpCode Java Version 2 per the instructions. That appeared to download and install just fine, but then gave a "verification error" when started on the Blackberry (see screen captures below).

Next up, installed UpCode Java Version 3, had exactly the same result as Version 2. OK, so no joy so far! Lastly, downloaded UpCode Basic, which happily installed itself alongside UpCodeJava. The Basic version apparently is for cellphones without cameras, since when you fire it up it asks you to manually input the bar-code number (which is also on the bar-code, below the code figure). On doing this with a number taken from the examples provided on the UpCode web site it fired up the web browser and went to the appropriate site!

OK, so this probably works just fine if you have a model that is specifically supported... Having only been successful in installing the Basic version, this blogger can't really comment much on this software solution. And of course the company is much more than just its free bar-code reader software, so this isn't any judgment of their capabilities....