Blackberry Pearl 8100 Review
This past week I gave into the urge to pick up a PDA like phone. I wanted a device that was a phone first but offered other features such as true HTML web browsing and the ability to efficiently do email and chat. The blackberry lived up to all of these requests and much more.
I was able to set up my Gmail account in approximately two minutes. All I had to enter was my email address and password, it knew how to hook itself up from there. There was no entering SMTP or POP servers. Also, unlike pull technologies where you have to retrieve your email, the blackberry has push technology where the email just shows up with a short sound or pulse vibration.
Google talk, my preferred messaging platform, works in much the same fashion. I did have to download the client though. It is amazing how well you can keep up chatting with someone on a computer. The QWERTY keypad on this device is quite efficient after the initial learning curve of an hour or so.
Finally the blackberry device has the ability to do both WML and HTML web browsing. While some HTML sites look a bit stretched out, most are very usable. Even though the WML sites are faster to load, I tend to stay away from them since they require more clicks to poke around. I dislike clicking next 14 times. I'd much rather wait a few more seconds and download the entire content and then scroll through it. Speaking of scrolling, the trackball on this phone makes scrolling and navigating links a breeze. Roll the trackball on to a link and then press it to invoke the hyper link, that's it. All things considered, this is the first device that I have used in this category that was done right. In my opinion it's usability makes it the Macintosh of phones.
NOTE: This blog entry was typed entirely on the blackberry.
World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals
I watched the climactic ending with my 1 year old son sitting on my knee. This was a timeless moment that I will remember forever. Nothing could equal being there, but I came close.
MacBook Pro too hot, try this!
I picked up the following application called Fan Control and have had a "cooler" laptop ever since. It's simple and effective, just what you would expect on this platform.
Apple support was impressive
The night before Thanksgiving the hard drive in my two month old Mac Book Pro shot craps. What an unlucky night for such an unfortunate event to happen. After all, the Apple store near my house was obviously closed on Thanksgiving and the genius bar was closed the following day due to Black Friday shopping. Finally my genius appointment came Saturday morning at 10 a.m. The genius validated my original assessment that the hard drive was bad. He put together a ticket and placed my Mac Book Pro in the sick bay. The ETA on it's return was 5 days. Ouch! When it was all said and done, I would then be without my baby for a full 7 day week. Fortunately for me, around 4pm Monday, Apple called and said my machine was fixed and ready to be picked up. They ended up overnighting the hard drive to the Apple store since they didn't carry the 7200 RPM drives in stock and installed the new drive the same day it arrived. Kudos to Apple for beating my expectations.