Unruly Rambling - blackberry tag

Apple iPhone 8GB reviewed by a very satisfied BlackBerry Pearl user.

Sat, 11 Aug 2007 04:41:16 GMT

Way way back in the year of 2006 when Apple released the news that they were working on the iPhone, I didn't really blink an eye. My wife, on the other hand, was immediately interested. First let me say that she is not the typical business user. My wife manages a restaurant that we own. Needless to say, she appreciates technology but isn't driven by it like I am. The consumer oriented features of the iPhone were right up her alley. She loved the email and iPhoto integration. The ability to sync her small collection of mp3's was great since she doesn't have an iPod. And last but not least, browsing the web with a real internet experience would be perfect for slow moments at the restaurant. After reading the ads and talking to her about the iPhone, I was a skeptic. Basically, I was convinced that it would be mostly hype. I have always been skeptical of PDA type phones since there focus was usually not on the phone features but instead on features like stylus integration and voice recording. My desire has always been to have a device that was a phone first and a pda second. In the likes of being simple, input functions were always optional to me. I would have been happy with a pda phone that did phone functions well along with read only display of pda data (calendar, email, office docs, etc.

Back in December 2006, I became a BlackBerry Pearl user after a friend of mine from work gave me a demo of his new toy. I was immediately blown away by the close attention to detail that the BlackBerry had. To date, it was the best looking cell phone that I'd come across and had a very intuitive and simple interface. Being a longtime Apple user, the Blackberry's close attention to detail was immediately obvious and intrigued me. Within a week or so, I joined him and purchased the Pearl at full retail price. That's right, I wasn't even up for contract renewal. I think the grand total was $300 out of pocket. I never blinked an eye at the amount since I had very good intentions of productivity gains. The pearl's productivity functions were worth every penny. Specifically, push email and the plethora of 3rd party apps allowed me to make use of this device virtually anywhere. I was able to email, read rss feeds(newsgator), and get sports scores. You know, all the important data retrieval categories.

Now let's fast forward to the release of the iPhone. The Sunday after the device was released, my son and I were at the mall walking around aimlessly killing time. We sometimes head there when its raining or we have nothing to do. He is two so he has lots of energy and likes to truck around the mall on idle sundays. Anyway, we made the infamous, and usually expensive, trip into the Apple Store. After looking at the monumental device, I decided to ask if they had any in stock. The sales person said they did indeed have one and actually had many more than that. In an effort to be a good husband, I decided to contemplate buying one for her. A few moments later a caffeinated idea charged through my brain and my impulse to buy was satisfied. I chose the 8 GB model since it was only $100 more. I mean, if you are okay with spending $500 for a phone, why not $600 to double the capacity :)

I'll just say that she was pretty happy when I gave it to her. I was happy too since I would be able to play with it a bit too. Once she opened it and I played with it for a few minutes, I was very interested. Interested enough that I played with it every night after work for a week or more. She had to pry it out of my hands on a couple occasions just to make a call. My obsessive nature inspired her to pick up a second one for me. Her motivating factor was to facilitate her gaining control of her own phone. I was very grateful and switched over to the iPhone almost immediately. After using the device full time for a couple days, I was totally sold on the technology. I began to trust the typing suggestions and learned many ways to use the device and get the most of out it. The biggest perk was the ability to have a real web browser in hand. Other honorable mentions include, google maps, youtube, and the ability to sync iLife apps without buying a third party app. See Missing Sync for BlackBerry Released for details.

Since then, I have been using the iPhone for a month or so. Overall, I'm pretty impressed by the device. It is very similar to my Blackberry Pearl with respect to its close attention to detail. In my mind, the BlackBerry is the I Ching of messaging devices over the last 5 years. In my opinion, the iPhone doesn't displace the BlackBerry as the prototypical business users messaging tool of choice. The BlackBerry models are all very durable and suited for hard core business use. They have services that go through your companies intranet and allow you to get internal MS Exchange email remotely. Calendar syncing and meeting notices can all be managed remotely. At this time, the iPhone doesn't allow some of these features without accommodations from your companies IT staff. There are ways to do some of it but in order to have a seamless experience, you will need IT support.

Low and behold, my patient wife(she has to be since her husband is anything but patient) decided to remedy her situation by purchasing me matching 8GB iPhone. Since then, I have been quick to pull it out at lunch, play with it over dinner, and even during golf outings. I absolutely love this device. It's amazing to see the number of times that I really use the web browsing. I always avoided this with the BlackBerry Pearl. Even though the pearl was a step ahead of ordinary cell phones, it doesn't even compare to Apple's offering. I'm flabbergasted at how much I like the iPhone. I do everything on it from setting up tasks on Remember The Milk, reading RSS feeds using newsgator, and last but not least buying concert tickets from ticketmaster in the car driving to chicago. No other cell phone that I know of provides all the features that the iPhone does with the beauty of the Apple experience. With that being said, there is room for improvement. Specifically, listed below is my wish list.

Faster Network, EDGE doesn't cut it unless you are doing RSS. Remember I said I'm impatient
Copy/Paste
Multimedia Messaging. If you send me a picture message, I get a text message that directs me to download the image from a website where I have to enter two cryptic strings to find my picture. Since bullet 2 doesn't exist, this is something I'll never do since it would require me writing down the info or flipping back and forth between safari and the SMS app. Instead, I'll ignore the pic message.
Ability to use the landscape keyboard in all apps, not just safari
iChat
Greater Capacity so I can chuck my iPod
Normal headphone jack so I don't need an adapter
More Mail features(filters, rules, SMIME, faster rendering, etc)
ToDo Application to fulfill my GTD interest
User defined gestures
Ability to access file system to store files
Ability to sync notes

Missing Sync for Blackberry Released

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 15:59:00 GMT

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.

Missing Sync for BlackBerry

Tue, 16 Jan 2007 11:55:30 GMT

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.

Blackberry Pearl 8100 Review

Sat, 16 Dec 2006 16:58:22 GMT

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.