Back in January, I made a comment on my blog about Mark/Space releasing Missing Sync for Blackberry.  A week or two back, they came through and I have to say it was worth the wait.  Anyone still using PocketMac should stop what they are doing, uninstall that poor excuse for an application,  and download Mark/Space's far superior product.  It does everything pocketmac claims to do, it does more, and it does everything well.  If you are looking for a list of features, they can be found here.  While I'm a huge fan of Blackberry, this application makes a good thing even better.

Also, I'd like to thank Eric Ullman, Director of Marketing at Mark/Space, for sending me a free copy of Missing Sync for Blackberry for my participation in the beta cycle.  I was happy to help.  I'd also like to say thanks to the technical staff.  Their product exceeded my expectations. 

On Friday I had the pleasure of entering the No Spin Zone in downtown St. Louis. Bill O'Reilly was attending a function in St. Louis and 97.1 FM Talk put on a lunch at the Hilton St. Louis at the Ballpark that Bill hosted. Even though he was only on stage for 50 minutes or so, it was really exciting to hear him speak in person. Outside of a few negative comments about our left leaning newspaper, he had many good things to say about St. Louis.

Here are some photos that I took.

Bill O'Reilly

This is my call for Mark/Space to hurry up and release Missing Sync for BlackBerry. While I love my new BlackBerry Pearl, it is easy to tell why PocketMac is free. Besides crashing all the time, it also has a tendency to duplicate data and not pick up changes. I've seen many posts about people losing data so I worry every time I click that green button. On top of it not working correctly, it has two major deficiencies. First, you cannot sync documents. If you create a memo on your blackberry, it syncs to Stickies. I don't know about you but this seems like a pretty worthless feature. I've been a mac user since the System 7 days and I've never thought stickies were worth the disk space the app consumed. The other major annoyance is its lack of file transfer capability. I have a MicroSD card but the only way to move anything to it is by mounting the card as a external hard drive. Unfortunately, I see no way to copy pdf docs or other known formats and open the docs up using the phone software. Another weird thing is that the disk only has folders for pictures and audio. I'm a standard ring tone kinda guy. I think a phone should sound like, well a phone. I rarely take pictures with me so that feature isn't being utilized either. What I'd really like to do is grab the latest technical PDF with me and read it while waiting to get my hair cut or while standing in line somewhere. Hopefully the Mark/Space notebook will solve this problem for me. Right now, I'm forced to email the docs to myself and access them that way.

A friend from work was fortunate enough to attend Macworld 2007 and kind enough to pick me up a tshirt from the company store. Check out the tshirt, I absolutely love it! The Apple snobbery is second to none.

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.

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.