Berry411 v3 has now shipped; read the Berry411 project page for details and installation instructions. I’ve had the new version out there quietly for several days now and it seems like few issues are being encountered.

The most significant new feature is address book integration. You can get driving directions to any person in your address book, or do a reverse lookup to get their address based on their phone number, or set your Berry411 “Other” location to their address.

Moving forward, I believe this functionality is a hint of the way in which the built-in software and data on mobile devices will be merged seamlessly with additional, live data out on the web. Using the mobile web will no longer be a separate, unnatural activity.

There is also an important bug fix which resolves the class cast exceptions [*] that AskMeNow and 8700 users were seeing.

V3 is the first version of Berry411 that requires OS4.0+, but my logs show that the vast majority of Blackberry users are (surprisingly enough) running an OS this recent.

[*] It turns out that the Blackberry PersistentStore implementation depends 100% on the goodwill and competence of software developers not to trash each other’s setting. Each persisted item is supposed to have a globally unique key obtained by hashing the class name, but RIM doesn’t specify the hashing function or emphasize strongly enough the importance of uniqueness. Both AskMeNow and Berry411 choose “1″ for their first key, leading to predictably bad results.