Updated phone thoughts

Got a new work phone, and have been considering the Droid lately, so I've been more aware of the strengths and weaknesses of my phones and potential replacements.

The BlackBerry has been chugging along merrily, resisting my mistreatment, and only suffering a single design flaw. I purchased QuickLaunch a few months ago, and have been extremely pleased with the increased control. I love being able to operate my phone without looking at it, and the customizable shortcuts coupled with the BB's autotext feature means I can press the side button twice to open a text message to someone, press "q" three times (it's in the corner of the keyboard, and easy to find), then press space to autocomplete the "qqq" to "On my way." and click twice to send. All without looking at my phone. Once I started considering the BB strengths, I had to stop and really think of all the times I use the built in shortcuts and the QuickLaunch shortcuts to navigate through the OS. It was just so intuitive, I did it without even thinking. No tapping and scrolling, no clicking and dragging, just press "D" for memopad, "C" for contacts, "B" for browser, and go! Not to mention, doing all these shortcuts so quickly means I get almost no OS lag, which would wear on my nerves quickly.

I've gotten quite good at typing blind on it, which I love, and the keys are just as responsive and sturdy as the day I got it. Considering the new droids has made me respect the BB's overall size, and form (most droids being big and blocky). Big enough to feel sturdy and sure in my hands, while small enough for one handed operation (and I have small hands), and easy pocket carry (which I prefer). The trackball navigation has become second nature, and in the event of lag (usually when opening a heavy app), I scroll the ball down the exact amount I intended to move the cursor exactly where I intended. I only realize how reliable it is because the lag makes me wonder if I got the right amount of scroll just before it highlights exactly what I was looking at. This brings me to the one design flaw.

The trackball is prone to gather dust, and debris, causing it to refuse to roll in one direction. Earlier models had removable trackballs, and a little maintenance was no big deal, while later models use touchpads which eliminate the moving part altogether. The BB Bold, however, had a non-removable ball, which means the only way to clean it is with alcohol and a cotton swab. I've only had it lock up on me three times, but every time was still annoying. I'm worried that it will eventually lock up to the point that I can't clean/fix it.

Aside from that, the BlackBerry really shows its design maturity in almost every category. It really is a working phone. I'll miss it when I switch.

I considered getting it as another phone, but a BlackBerry, a Droid, AND a (work) Samsung Windows Mobile phone? That's one too many.

Classic awesome in the palm of your hand

I was browsing the blackberry app store, digging through the productivity and utility apps, when I realized that I should look at the goddamn games, because I always forget you can do something other than work and tweet amusing photos.

Two pages in I jump out of my chair when I see this!

The classic Sid Meier's Pirates! game! The screen shots look very true to the original I played with my friend on his 486 in 6th grade! Freakin' sweet. Can't wait to play it.

BlackBerry Bold OS Update

The recent OS upgrade (4.6.0.304) seems to have fixed a few annoying issues.

I haven't had a single crash since the update, and youtube streaming doesn't suck anymore! Finally I can make use of this sweet resolution to watch HD videos with clarity. Also, applications that use the internet are much faster and more stable.

If someone could work on making the browser less clunky, that'd be great.

In the meantime; I'm enjoying my Bold more and more. Rare yet annoying downtime aside.


I entered this post with it, while waiting in the lobby of a datacenter.

Running on hour SIX of the BlackBerry outage

This is why you don't centralize.

This is retarded.




Blame Canada

Bold crashing!

I've been catching the Blackberry Bold crashing more and more often. It'll freeze up, the screen will blank, the LED will be on red and solid, and after a bit, it'll reboot. It does all this silently, so I can't know it's happening unless it's visible when it happens. When I catch it rebooting, I feel like I'm catching a puppy peeing on the carpet. Since it takes only a couple of minutes to reboot, it would be easy to miss. Then again, it does sit in my sight 10 hours every weekday, and I can't think of more than one time it crashed at work. The crashes have only interrupted me twice, and still seem rather infrequent, but it's just annoying somehow to know it might be happening when I'm not looking. I looked up some info on the problem, but I can't think of any commonality between the crashes I was able to see. Though they definitely happen more often when I'm not interacting with the phone. I'm running most recent firmware 4.6.0.167 on AT&T.

Another annoyance is AT&T's constant bobbing and weaving between networks. It seems to adversely affect performance. I can set the blackberry down on the table, completely untouched, and watch it switch from 3 bars on "EDGE" with blackberry support to 1 bar on 3G to 5 bars (lowercase) "edge" with blackberry to 3g <-lower case "G" with a cherry on top. The constant network switching is ridiculous and annoying. Particularly when different services mean different abilities, and I have no interest in memorizing every possible configuration and the data speed, email connectivity, phone MMS, and VM availability for each possibility.

A few more notes; the bedside mode doesn't seem to brighten up on radio communication. Must have been some weirdness. But if you're waiting for the screen to dim under the lamp on your nightstand, you'll be waiting forever. It only dims when the lights are out. The light sensor adjusts the brightness for the ambient light level. So when you're outside, it's bright, when you're inside, it doesn't have to be as bright. Also, there DOES appear to be an icon that should appear relating to the program that is causing the LED to blink. If nothing shows up, it's probably stuck. By the way, the LED getting stuck hasn't happened in quite some time.

Still; the blackberry bold is working out pretty well. Data is available, browsing is versatile on funky websites (though still slow), and the phone (the part of the phone I use the least) hasn't let me down yet. But then; the bold would have to murder my parents and eat my dog to be worse than my previous phone, so maybe I'm a bit more willing to put up with small nagging issues.

More blackberry bold notes

I figured out the bedside mode weirdness, apparently when you put it in bedside mode, it dims the screen, turns off the bright LED, and provides a perfect clock to put on your nightstand before you go to bed. UNLESS! The blackberry uses the radio to connect or check something. Then the screen lights up to full brightness and annoys the crap out of you. Apparently the only way around this is to specify that radio be turned off while in bedside mode, but that seems a bit ham-handed. Why not just not have the radio trigger the screen brightening up? Whatever. I turned off the radio and probably started sleeping better because I wasn't waking up at every e-mail to check it, but it does get annoying when you wake up, unplug it, and carry it away without realizing that you're still in bedside mode (despite being out of the clock program), and the radio is still off. Annoying, but limited in impact.

Whenever the blackberry connects to certain networks, it seems to emit a three foot field of annoy-your-speakers-and-headphones. It's sporadic, but usually seems to happen whenever I'm on the phone at work, and I have to pick up the bold and move it to the desk next to me, like it's on time-out. Fortunately, I don't use the phone very much :) Not sure what makes it annoy nearby speakers sometimes and not other times, or why I've never had similar problems with other phones (at least, not since 1998). Once again, not a big deal, and really very sporadic, but annoying nonetheless.

Lastly, twice so far, has the red light begun blinking red for no reason, and refused to stop without intervention. This is particularly vexing because not all the icons change when there is an LED blinking event, so you're left digging through the programs to try and find what you need to check. I understand the LED is kind of a cover-all, and it definitely simplifies alerting, but a bit of text on the screen indicating the program that started the LED event would be nice. Anyways, the first time the LED began blinking for no reason, I read that pulling the battery would clear it, which it did, but the second time, I wanted to figure out a way to stop it without initiating a full reboot of the phone. In my annoyance I turned the phone off ("soft" off, not pull-the-battery off) twice, and on the second time it cleared it. Weird. It's been quite infrequent, so no big deal, just more minor annoyances.

Now for the good bits; I continue to be impressed with the battery life, and the speaker phone has been clear and notably not-annoying from the listener's side. Meanwhile the bold remains quite resilient to the junk in my pocket, resting on rough, hard surfaces, spills of food, and life in general. I've been quite impressed with the gmail notifications, which I receive so fast my blackberry trills, and I hit refresh on my gmail in my browser, and it hasn't gotten the message yet. Technically, it's not that important that blackberry alert the second the mail gets in instead of 5 minutes after it gets in, but fuck you, I want to know I have stupid joke e-mails in my mailbox RIGHT NOW! I really am impressed with the speed of delivery. The keyboard is proving to be more intuitive than I thought it would be. I keep surprising myself with how much I can type with just my left hand without looking. I think in a few more months I might even be able to touch type one handed somehow.

As for my implementation, I've found that calendar items work best for reminding me of things I need to be doing. While I can't specify more than one snooze time, I can click to open the event, and quickly change the alert time to an hour or a day in the future using the trackball. I've gotten used to the trackball, by the way, and am pretty good at seeing how many moves I need to make, and moving my thumb just the right amount before clicking it. It really speaks to the amount of testing that must have gone into figuring the exact sensitivity. Since the trackball is so sensitive, a better way to scroll up and down on long pages in the web browser, or when searching for an old e-mail is to use the spacebar for scrolling down, and shift+spacebar scrolling up.

Also, I like AT&T's ability to easily check your phone minutes, data plan, account balance, and pay your bill. Though I suspect this became an industry standard sometime after I stopped owning my personal cell phone, and using my work cell phone. Still good.

Jerks!

How DARE they not provide me with increased functionality on their free service!

Only kinda tongue-in-cheek... :)

Blackberry power update

The phone has been off power for about 16 hours, and was used sparingly for a short phone call, a few text messages, about 10 mins of internet access, and receipt of a few e-mails. It's at 80% power now.

I think it's safe to say that on minor use, the blackberry will last 1.5 to 2 days on battery power.

But that's not very interesting.

So I'm going to start playing Pandora, and see how long we can go from 80% :)
UPDATE: Two hours, and I'm at 55%, so about 12.5% an hour playing Pandora? Potentially 8 hours of Pandora playing off battery power? Nice.

---

Oh yeah, almost forgot, one more thing I like about the Bold. Separate memory threads are used in SMS and e-mail generation. This means that instead of the browser opening the e-mail app to send an e-mail, it has its own e-mail interface to the app. Same for SMS. This means when you open the contact screen, select "Send SMS," and begin writing the message, if you get an SMS before you finish, you can flip to Messages, read the new SMS, and flip back to Contacts, and finish your SMS. This is intelligent multitasking, and I love it.
UPDATE: oh yeah, one more thing, the speakers on the Bold are retardedly awesome. The quality of sound is fucking brilliant, even on the loudest setting. VERY impressed.

Blackberry power notes

Not sure exactly why, but the battery usage dropped considerably.

Out of the box, it needed to be charged every half day, and wouldn't make it through the night, but now, the battery meter just doesn't want to go down.

I think I'm going to give it a good charge, and see how long it runs off power (and keep track of all my interactions with it).

Also, the bedside mode is a bit squirrely. When it's on power, and in bedside mode, all the lights turn off, and the display dims heavily. But sometimes I wake up, and the display is at normal brightness, and I have to exit bedside mode, and enter it again. Odd.

Busy busy busy

Last few weeks have been crazy, and I've been trying to manage my time. Honestly, the blackberry has helped. I'm slowly training myself to constantly check my calendar and task list, and to take free time to check for hastily recorded voice notes to transcribe into tasks and calendar items.

So far I've been keeping up, and the new bed has improved my sleeping dramatically, but I'm still waiting for a call from the sleep study people telling me I don't have breathing problems when I sleep, but I'm not holding my breath (or am I?).

Before we got the new bed, I had three days in a row of nights that had a full 8 hours of sleep (with dreams!), where I woke up just as fatigued as when I went to bed. The last day was bad. It was worse than I remembered from when I had insomnia when I was younger.

The business is progressing nicely, we're doing our best to plan as much as we can to secure our position in that 5% that makes it, and with the resources we have, I feel quite confident. When I really sat and thought about it, I was surprised how many people I knew who could be of help in building our business. For future reference, try to burn as few bridges as possible, and tell EVERYONE you know that you're looking for people who you can talk to about starting a business. That 8 degrees of Kevin Bacon thing works for the rest of us. You'd be surprised how close you are to people who can help you (and which friends will get to to those people!).

I've had the entrepreneur bug for years, and always wondered what made you a capital "B" Businessman, and not just an employee. Since I'm right in the middle of it, I'm starting to notice it happen to me, and think I have some answer. It seems simple, but simply by surrounding yourself with the information, magazines, reference material, and like-minded people, you change the way you see things. You make different connections, and see different things. Little what-if business ideas that you kick around with your friends get a dose of reality as you figure potential profits, marketability, supply chain problems, operating expenses, insurance requirements, and on and on. It's strange to go to the same store/business/restaurant you've been going to for years, and find yourself noticing things about their operation or product you never even knew were at play previously. Like seeing things with new eyes.

I hope my blogging won't suffer, because I find value in it, but I feel certain it will. Well, maybe I just need to schedule time for it in my BlackBerry to make it happen. :) Actually, I've gotten a few posts out that I would have otherwise forgotten were it not for the ease with which I can record voice notes. Maybe I shouldn't be so negative. Maybe blogging will get better.

The wedding is fast approaching, and the degree of coordination required for even our small wedding is surprising. I can't even begin to imagine running a $100,000 affair.

The blackberry likes and dislikes continues. Likes: Using GPS and google maps to store my parking spot location in the maze of streets, people, and cars that is Downtown Huntington Beach on the Fourth of July. That was pretty sweet. The camera is 2 Megapixels, and enough to capture the entire whiteboard and keep text readable. The high res screen lets me read it without zooming in terribly close. Very useful. Dislikes: Youtube sucks on the blackberry bold. There are ways around it, downloaders you can get, but there is no app (AFAIK) that interfaced directly with youtube's stream that presents it well. I specifically made youtube NOT one of the requirements for my phone, so I can't complain officially, but it would be nice. The phone speaker volume does not change when you change sound profiles. So when I set the profile to loud, I had to turn the earpiece all the way up so I could hear over the noise around me. Later when I changed the sound profile back to normal, the earpiece volume was still turned all the way up. SURPRISE! Also, there does not appear to be different stored volumes for audio played when headphones are plugged in, and when they're not. So you might turn the volume down on the headphones to listen to music quietly, then unplug them, and miss your ringer because the volume is turned way down. Also, you can't turn on the wireless connections (phone/internet) when the battery is below 10%, even if you're plugged in. That seems weird. Small things; still a great phone, still convinced I made the right decision.

Had a bit of twitter fun last night and live-tweeted some hot meat-on-grill action. I only use twitter for random thoughts that come up (none of that, "I'm going to the store!" "I'm buying cheese!" "I'm driving home!" nonsense), but I think I like the idea of live-tweeting like that. Plus the tweetberry app on the blackberry makes it easier than burning yourself on my grill last night. You can check it out, and follow me HERE. Or you can not, and not. It's a free country.

Getting a queen sized mattress and box spring home on the roof of a Passat was a bit comical, but successful. While use of paracord, and proper knots kept things where they needed to be, and the experience was largely uneventful, I still think we could have made it better if we had played the Benny Hill Theme while prepping the car.

COD:WaW has been notably absent with the recent rush on my time, but the last few times I was playing, I noticed some form of synchronized xbox live-wide suck that was taking place. Suddenly, every game I played, barely made it above 400, and usually only had one person on each tame make it into double digits. I kept joining new games, and trying again later, but it persisted. Very strange. It's as if a million voices were awesome at COD; and were suddenly sucky.

I need to get to the range to sight in some rifles (including the Enfield I accidentally moved the front sight on), but my range time, and frankly, interest has been consumed with the business and the wedding. My CMP Garand is still on hold pending finalization of expenses.

My state tax refund is likely going to return to me as an IOU. I'm pretty sure some bank will honor the IOU, but I might just keep it for myself to get the maximum return on the money they took from me, and collected interest on for a year and a half. But it really depends on a couple of things, like the interest rate, and whether or not I think there's still going to be a California state government by the time the IOU comes due.

Guess that's it for now.

Who owns the octopus?

Blackberry Bold likes and dislikes

Likes

• BB seems to acknowledge that their browser sucks at javascript by providing the option to enable or disable (beyond default settings) java on specific bookmarked pages. Works great when you want to run with java enabled, but a few bookmarked sites are slow, or running with java off, but a few bookmarked sites require java (like blogger.com). (there is also a keyboard shortcut to turn java on and off)
  
• Shortcuts are a necessity. Because the Bold doesn't have a touch screen, you have a trackball that can interface with every menu item on the screen. While this is good, it's really not as good as a straight touch interface. To make up for that, they added keyboard shortcuts (you need to disable fast dialing from the home screen) to hit all the primary applications. This way you can just pick it up, and open the program with a keypress, whether it's on the home screen, in the extended menu, or buried in a folder. The shortcuts make navigation a breeze, but they are limited to the applications blackberry selected. If there was a way to customize shortcuts, navigation would be near perfect.
  
• It was frickin' sweet to pause Pandora internet radio to record a voice note while google maps queries my GPS to track my location down to 3 meters. Multitasking kicks ass.
  
• It has a voice note recorder that can be set to an external button and doesn't require excessive interface. I can pick it up, press the external button to wake it up and open the program, press the trackball to start recording, press it again to stop, click to the right to open the menu, and click to save. I like being able to record quick voice notes while driving without taking my eyes off the road. If there was integration with the clicky in the mic unit on my headphones where I could just hold the click until it beeps, speak, then click again to stop recording and return to the previous application, that would be the ultimate.
  
• The extended "button" menu keeps the last selected item highlighted even if it's different from the item highlighted in the non-extended menu. There is a short menu on the "home" screen, and an extended one when you press the menu button. Having the extended menu start with the last item you selected still selected is convenient. One of those nice little things.
  
• While I'm not using blackberry's e-mail system, I like that I have the option of opening one of my separate e-mails, or open the main one with all of them combined into one primary mailbox. You also have the option of including SMS messages to make it your one-stop-icon for messaging.
  
• The application switcher (which works like alt+tab) can be set to an external button for quick switching between the last two applications. Clicking it opens a menu of the open applications and the primary apps, with the selector on the last one you used. From there you can click the same button again to go to the previous, or scroll the trackball to select another one.
  
• You have a multimedia button in addition to individual media buttons. So if you want a home shortcut to just photos, or just music, or all multimedia, you can have it.
  
• The weekly calendar, scrolling right across the days, full week view, notes at the bottom, awesome, awesome, awesome.
  
• Symbol selection is quick and easy to do.
  
• The "leather" back seems odd at first, but it turns out to be just rough enough to not slide around on smooth surfaces, and just smooth enough not to stick to everything it comes into contact with. Strange, but a winner.

Dislikes

• There seems to be some lag in the OS when flipping between networks, but this became less pronounced after the first day (???)
  
• The built in browser sucks at life. There are alternatives, but after I turned off javascript, it sped up to a tolerable speed. Not quick, but tolerable. I have yet to try another since I haven't been using the browser enough for it to really slow me down.
  
• The "hourglass" (a ticking clock) comes up, usually in browser, and while it's up, the entire phone is non-responsive. This reveals either resource hogs, poor program resource limiting, or non-true multitasking. It's rare, but when it happens it seems to happen multiple times before it stops. Possibly associated with switching networks?
  
• I had a crash today, I'm pretty sure it was limited to the Pandora app, since I went back to the menu screen when it was done taking a dump, and Pandora wasn't running. While this isn't BB's fault, it smacks of bad memory allocation to allow a 3rd party app to lock up the entire OS. What is this? Windows 3.1? Windows 98?
  
• Nitpick; the click on the wheel is a little too hard to push with the pad of my thumb. Maybe my thumbs are just soft.
  
• Lacking complete integration of the accessories. My headphones have a click button on the mic that can control the music and phone, but 3rd party apps seem to ignore this peripheral functionality. Note that this is the single advantage of Apple's monolithic hardware/software/accessories architecture. (except BIG TEH MONIES FOR STEVE of course) Likewise other 3rd party apps that do not take advantage of keyboard shortcuts, or lack documentation of them.
  
• Calendar reminders can only be "snoozed" for one length of time. You can set it to whatever you want, but when an alert comes up, you can't snooze one for an hour, and another for 15 minutes.

All in all, I'm impressed with it. I'm growing quite certain I made the right decision.

testy testy test

Testes


I'm blogging on my bold while pandora plays, and google maps extrapolates my position.

This is pretty fucking sweet.

What kind of sdk do they have again??? ;)

A Bold new move

I post this from my blackberry bold. I'm generally not a fan of phone companies, so if I have any problems with provider or device, you'll hear about it.

So far (2 hours :]) the browser is a bit slow, but I knew it was going to be slower than the iphone. Everything else looks great.