During DevConnections my lifeline to the office was my BlackBerry.  It also was my lifeline to keep in touch with the guys from the office that came to Vegas with me.  Richard and I had BlackBerry Messenger installed on our BlackBerries and it was a godsend.  Ray didn't have BlackBerry Messenger and there was a very big difference in getting in touch with him.  Of course I could still email him, and the since BlackBerries have email pushed to them instead of working on a pull model he got the emails fast, but I had no clue when he did.  Sometimes email takes longer to get to servers, servers can take long to handle them depending on load, etc.  BB Messenger let me know when the message was received and let me know when Richard was writing back (ala MSN Messenger).  If you have a BlackBerry, I highly recommend downloading and installing BlackBerry Messenger.