I mentioned a while back how I had become a very reluctant Blackberry user.  Well, the used 7290 I bought apparently had a sensitive soul: it upped and died very shortly after I wrote that post.

Since I still need one, I had two choices.  Buy another used Blackberry, or buy a new one with a cell phone contract extension…  I couldn’t bear the thought of being chained to AT&T for another two years, and eBay didn’t work out so well, so I turned to that trusty alternative bastion of used goods, Craigslist.

[A quick diversion.  I’m with AT&T because the idea of not being on a GSM network in the 21st century strikes me as crazy.  I go home to the UK often enough & have been a GSM guy for long enough, that the idea that my cell won’t work over there strikes me as just plain dumb.  For reasons I don’t fully understand, T-Mobile don’t operate in North Carolina.  Suncom do, but when I needed a phone plan, they were very expensive.  Since I moved here, T-Mobile announced that they are acquiring Suncom, so by mid-summer, I should be able to get T-Mobile service here too…and my contract with AT&T ends in the fall.  Since T-Mobile actually give a damn about their customers, I cannot wait!]

I ended up buying a more or less new 8800 model.  I know not from whence it came.  And I’m never going to ask.  But the price was right.

It’s all shiny.  Ooooh.  The backlight comes on when you use the keypad.  Aaahhh.  The screen rivals any handheld device I’ve used, and the weird nubbly trackball thing more or less works.  They put the call end key in a much better place, and generally this thing feels less like a UI designer’s nightmare.

Possibly most sexy, it has a built in GPS.  You can run the free Blackberry Maps application and it works with Google Maps too.  Not bad for a directionally challenged individual like me.

All in all, it’s a big improvement over the 7290.

But I still have a number of issues with it.  Still no inbox/sent sync unless I’m running Blackberry Enterprise Server (although I hear rumors of an app called BBerrySync that may save me).  Still no looping on menus, so if you get all the way to the bottom of a list, your only choice is to scroll all the way back up.  And the weird trackball thing highlights anything on screen, not just links/items you can click, which seems like an obvious UI flaw.  As with the 7290, the way it handles attachments is stupid too.

But at least it looks pretty.  All in all, I’d say the 8800 is the phone equivalent of a cliched trophy wife (or trophy husband, depending on your point of view) and I moderately embarrassed to be seen in public with it…

Categories: Thought o' the Day
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For various reasons I won’t bore you with, I’ve been playing with a Blackberry lately.  I bought one used and unlocked on eBay and have been messing with it for about a week.

I don’t get it and I really don’t see the reason for all the hype.  There are things the BB fails to do that my crummy old iPAQ PDA would do back in 1999, and I’m really not kidding.

Now admittedly, I’m not running Blackberry Enterprise Server.  Running BES may dramatically improve your user experience, but without it, this thing is lame.

First of all, it’s hard to use as a phone.  The form factor is horrible — you have no choice but to dial with two hands while looking directly at the keypad.  Not to mention that the "end call" key is EXACTLY where your fingers rest when holding the phone to your head.

The UI is pretty clunky too.  You access everything through the scroll wheel, but no part of the UI allows looping, so if you’ve scrolled all the way to the last menu item to find something, you have to scroll all the way back up to access a different menu item. Slow slow slow.  Not to mention that functions are oddly separated — no way to easily search your contacts when in the "recently dialed" page.  No real ability to set up my own shortcuts.  Call voicemail is buried in the phone menu…

And why on earth is the backlight in no way connected to user actions?  You have to press the backlight button (which is tiny and hard to find in the dark) to activate it.  That’s just dumb.  There is an app you can download that solves this for you, but jeez…

Now the thing the device is famous for is email and desktop integration.  When I plugged it in to Outlook, the sync worked flawlessly — my first and only visit to a Blackberry happy place.  I got my POP3 email account set up on the device and sure enough email just started arriving.  Feeling the potential for some excitement, I send myself an email with an attachment.  Oh.  Attachments aren’t handled by the device itself.  The BBSS (big Blackberry Server in the Sky) parses the attachment, fiddles with it, and sends a text version to the Blackberry.  But only after you try and open the attachment and wait for a few minutes.

Hmm.  Must be a better way.  So I download an app for the Blackberry that claims to let me preview and edit Office documents.  Only to find that it works the same way.  Doh!

Oh well.  But still, kind of nice to get real-time push email, no?  Well actually no.  For one simple reason: there is no way to synchronize the inbox and sent folders with your desktop.  Yup.  You can sync your tasks, your contacts, your calendar, even your stupid notes.  But you can’t sync your inbox and sent folders.  Come on!  Active-sync could do that in version 1.0 on an otherwise crummy Windows CE device. 

So now I have to either not use the BB to reply to important emails, or jump through a bunch of silly hoops to make sure I have a copy of my response on my desktop.  Not to mention that the mini-qwerty keypad just ain’t that fast.

Prior to getting my Berry on, I used a Sony Ericsson W810.  Small candy-bar format, good menu system and with a bit of hacking you can restore SE’s basic POP3 email client.  For those with a itch to be in contact, you can even set the email client to ping the mail server every 5 minutes — no re-routing through BBSS required.  I also find the T9 predictive text to be faster for most short messages than the Berry’s qwerty keypad.  I can use it one handed without looking directly at the phone and it has a pretty good built in camera.

I’m sure newer Berries have some improvements over the 7290 I’m trying to use, but trading my phone for a second-rate closed-system PDA with issues is clearly not for me…

Categories: Thought o' the Day
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I was talking with a friend of mine the other day.  He’s a former tech exec who now works in real estate development and his business has been a bit beaten up by the state of the economy.

We got to talking about the current state of things and a couple of notions dropped out that I thought I’d share.

I’ve never taken an economics class in my life, so of course I’m thoroughly qualified to be an expert on the topic.  In general it seems to me in general that the economy does best when the government leaves it alone.  Ideally, the government should ignore it all together — the further they are from tweaking it, the better I feel about the health of the economy overall.

And I’m really not kidding about that.

Why?  Well whenever I hear someone talking about the economy at large, they make frequent reference to agriculture numbers, manufacturing output, volume of durable/white goods etc.  Is that really what drives the US economy at this point?  Doesn’t seem so to me.  Not to mention that the unemployment figures are so massaged, filtered and tweaked at this point as to be meaningless.

Viewing the economy as a machine that can be adjusted to "work right" is all very well in theory, but as I put it to my friend during our chat, :

"I’m just not convinced that the dials they are reading are connected to the knobs they’re twiddling"

After I said it, it occurred to me that I’d stated a rather common entrepreneurial problem too.  We have a lot of metrics that we informally pay attention to (do people like the product, is dev moving forward, do folk get what we do etc), and we make changes to what we do to get the outcome we want to see.  But it’s easier than you’d think to connect an outcome to the wrong input…

So before you make changes in your business, especially big changes, you really need to dig in and see if the outcome you think you’re going to be altering is _actually_ connected to the change you’re making.

Case in point:  our pitch.  We thought the lack of success was driven by the fact that we couldn’t demo much of what we were talking about in a pretty product.  It turns out that is only partly true.  Having a sexy demo definitely helps, but speaking exactly the right language about where we fit in the corporate eco-system has proven to be equally important.

Fiddling with the product would have only gotten us so far.  If we hadn’t realized that the outcome was being driven by more than that, we wouldn’t have made any progress…

Categories: Thought o' the Day
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This made me laugh… Although mostly because that bastion of the high moral ground known as Fox Networks refused to air it…

Pot calling kettle… Come in kettle… (see this link if that makes no sense to you)

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Been a busy few days on the personal front.

Congratulations are due to my sister and her better half on producing a very cute new niece, and to my long time buddy David and his wife on their first kid too…

<Cue Lion King music>

Sadly, People* the fish didn’t make it.  He will be missed.

* Seriously, that’s what my daughter called the Betta we bought.  Cool name, cool fish.  But apparently People needed to shed the mortal coil… Try explaining that to a 2 year old!

Categories: Thought o' the Day
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