iPhone 3G

It was fun to watch the WWDC keynote today on MacRumors. It was even more fun to watch things on summize as Twitter held up admirably during the keynote. I was impressed with the new iPhone. I really like the white version, as it seems like a nod to the original iPod to me (an owner of the original.) It made me think, should I get rid of my Blackberry 8830 and switch to the iPhone?

iPhone 3G

• The screen on the iPhone is awesome. The Blackberry's is nice, but it's not really close.
• Much better for listening to music. Blackberry is functional for this, but hardly elegant.
• Web browsing is much better on the iPhone, especiall now that it has a 3G network. The Blackberry browser is good, and Opera works great, but mobile Safari is very nice.
• The iPhone has a camera. I miss having a camera, even if the iPhone's is crummy (as are most phone cameras.)
• The iPhone has wi-fi. I often use my Blackberry's network access in places that have free wi-fi.

Blackberry 8830

• I have tried the iPhone keyboard, and greatly prefer my Blackberry's keyboard. This one is not even close.
• The GMail app for the Blackberry is excellent. On the iPhone you can use the GMail as IMAP, but that is not as good, not even close.
  
• Of course the Blackberry receives my email and calendar from my work's Exchange servers. This is the main appeal of Blackberry for many. If I had an iPhone, I think I would have to run a client from my desktop computer at work. Co-workers have told me that this is a problem because our desktop computers run the 64-bit version of Windows 2003, and a lot of Apple's software has issues with this.
• Google Maps is also very nice on the Blackberry, even if Verizon screws us over and doesn't let it access the device's GPS. Then again I have used GPS on phones (both mine and my wife's) and it is useful, but definitely not a replacement car GPS. Anyways, Google Maps on the Blackberry seems a lot better than accessing the web application on the iPhone.

Hmm, it doesn't seem like a slam dunk either way. It seems like the calendar/email push advantage may be negated, depending on the OS issues. If Google made iPhone apps, especially for GMail, it would almost clinch it for me. I've used GMail as IMAP provider with Mail.app and did not like it very much. Blackberry GMail is a killer app for me. Given Google's investment in Android, it seems unlikely that they will create a similar app for the iPhone... I think I will stick with my Blackberry.

Valley Fair Apple Store Chaos

I went to the Apple Store at Valley Fair mall here in San Jose today. I needed to pickup a video adapter for my MacBook. It was complete chaos there.

First, they are remodeling the store. So they have a small fraction of the store open still, while most is closed down. Ok, remodeling is good, but ...

We're still in the midst of iPhone mania, at least here in Silicon Valley. So take the combination of a lot more people than usual at the store plus much smaller space than usual, and what do you get? Chaos.

The Genius Bar was supposedly closed and that area was being used to check out customers. Only there were lots of folks up there with their Macs, presumably with some kind of problem needing attention from a Genius. They had a big wait board for people wanting to buy iPods (no not iPhones.) You put in your name and waited for it to be called apparently. "Take a number" just seems so un-Apple.

Luckily they have the roving checkout people at the Apple Store. So I was able to flag one down and pay with my credit card without having to deal with Geniuses and iPod lines. Another nice feature is that their system recognized my credit card and remembered my email address, so my receipt was emailed to me.

On my way out, I noticed several iPhones without anybody around them. I decided it was time for me to take a look at one. For some reason I thought it would be smaller. Maybe that's because my iPod is a Nano, which is very small. The iPhone was using the store's wifi, but it did seem to load pages pretty slow. I typed in some addresses and did some searches on it. Typing wasn't a problem. I made more typos than I make on my Blackberry, but I'm sure that's just a learning curve.

I tried the king of all AJAX pages, Google Mail. I wanted to view my receipt that Apple had just emailed to me. It did seem to work, but oh man it was much more painful than using GMail on my Blackberry. I guess you can use GMail's POP forwarding to access your mail the mail app on the iPhone. Obviously I didn't try that, though I don't think GMail translates well to POP (I don't want to see my outgoing messages in my inbox, thank you.) Also, I read that a lot of people can't use the "normal" GMail interface on their iPhone unless they are on wifi. Also, I could not open the PDF of my receipt on the iPhone.

I took out my Blackberry, opened GMail on it, and then opened up the PDF receipt from Apple. It took far less time, even on EVDO instead of wifi. I definitely got some unfriendly looks from the customers there...

Hacking my 8830

Ok, so not really. I've had my Blackberry for a little over a week, and I continue to be more impressed with it. Here are some useful things.

1. Enable mass storage. You get a cryptic message for this, but totally want to do to this. It let's you access your Blackberry's file system. On my Macbook it makes the Blackberry look like a mounted drive, a la a DMG file or something, only its read/write not read-only. This is the easiest way to put pics or MP3s on there.
2. MP3 Ringtones. Forget buying ringtones. Just load some MP3s on there. Go to your song by going to Media -> Music. Pick your favorite song and the pick Menu -> Set as Phone Tone. Now that MP3 is your default ring tone. Want a special ring tone for different people? Go to the person in your address book. Click Menu -> Edit. Then click Menu -> Add Custom Phone Tune. Click enter. This will bring up a list of pre-set ringtones. You don't want any of this garbage. But scroll to the top of the list and click Browse. Then click Menu -> Explore. I went to Media Card/MY_MP3S. That gave me all of my MP3s. I just picked whatever I wanted from there.
3. Google Apps. Google obviously loves Blackberry users. GMail and Google Maps both rock for the Blackberry. Google Talk from RIM also rocks. If you open up Google Maps and pick a location, you can get directions. You'll notice that the "from here" is disabled. That's because GPS is not enabled for Google Maps by default, which brings me to my next tip.
4. Enable GPS. A former co-worker of got an 8850 and thought that Verizon had disabled the GPS. That would be a very Verizon thing to do, but it turns it's not the case. Go to Options -> Advanced -> GPS -> GPS Services and switch it to Location On. It's set to "911 Only" by default. Open Google Maps and you'll have to grant Google Maps permission to use the GPS. Now you've got the full GPS enabled Google Maps functionality. I found that I needed to be outside to get a good signal on it.

These tips are for Mac users only.

1. PocketMac. The Blackberry version is free and is very good.
2. Google Calendar. I sync iCal to my Google Calendars, and then sync iCal to my Blackberry via PocketMac.
3. Plaxo. I use Plaxo as a central repository for my contacts. I then installed the Plaxo plugin for Address Book. It becomes a cool read/write system. I update contacts in Address Book. That syncs things to Plaxo where they are persisted and available to me at work, etc. They are also copied to my Blackberry via PocketMac.

Other stuff...

1. I downloaded Opera Mini. It works ok. There are some web pages I can view in it that I cannot view in the Blackberry browser, such as ESPN Fantasy Baseball. Entering text into Opera is a pain though. It has its own interface for this that seems awkward. I still think it will come in handy in the long run.
2. I haven't tried syncing my Safari bookmarks to the Blackberry. That's a cool feature offered by PocketMac. I would need to clean up my Safari bookmarks first though.
3. Facebook Mobile is really well done. You can do most things that you'd want to do on a mobile device there. A lot of folks prescribe to the iPod/iTunes model when it comes to mobile apps, i.e. read-only on the device, do all your writes from your computer. Facebook does a good job of giving the right "writes" on their mobile version.

Update: An old co-worker of mine and an anonymous commenter both pointed out that even though you can supposedly enable GPS, Google Maps and other similar programs are not able to use it. My friend claims that Verizon has disabled the GPS in some way. My experience has been the same, so maybe this is true. I don't know why Verizon would do this...

Update #2: Ah ha, now I know why Verizon has disabled the GPS on the 8830. There's got to be a hack though...

Google Gears

This is actually the second time I've written about Gears. The other time, Flock ate my post. I wasn't too upset, since I was using a daily build of "Sulfur". It's much better (in terms of feature set) than the current 0.7 version of Flock, at least when it comes to blogging on Blogger because it supports Blogger labels. Anyways, back to Google Gears.

I gave it a try (via Google Reader of course), and was not too impressed for one simple reason. I have to tell it to "go offline." So I guess the idea is that I know I'll be offline later, so I will "go offline" now, thus downloading content to read later. Ok, that's fine, but not very useful. It requires too much planning, in my opinion.

It's really not that big of a deal for Google Reader. But clearly Gears has the most potential for other Google Apps that have more direct "offline" analogies: GMail and Google Docs. The choosing to go offline thing would be silly for either of these.

With a Gears enhanced GMail, I would expect to always have a copy of (at least) my most recent email. I'd expect to be able to search it, too, but that's another story for another day. For Google Docs, I would at least expect to have an offline version of all my "active" docs. For both of these apps, I would expect to have these things all the time, seamlessly. Anything else is of very limited value in my opinion.

So I am left to assume that Google will enable this kind of seamless enhancement via Gears, but they just haven't figured it out, yet. I think that makes the most sense. If they had figured it out, I'm sure they would have enabled it with Reader, even though it's not quite as essential for Reader. In fact I'll wager the reason they launched with Reader was exactly because they didn't have the above use cases solved, yet.

One other Gear related thing. I was fascinated that Adobe seemed to be hanging around for the launch of Gears. It's interesting in a lot of ways. First, Adobe already has something similar, but far less powerful than Gears: Flash Shared Objects. Gears and its database make SO's look silly. Second, doesn't a Gears enabled Flex application provide everything that an Apollo application could promise? Sure, an Apollo app could be "heavier", have a fancier UI maybe, do more with local files, etc. Finally, I got the feeling that there was a Adobe+Gears announcement that didn't happen. That something that was supposed to be ready for Google Developer Day, wasn't ready. That's why Adobe was there.

First Major Vista Problem: iTunes

Most of my transition to Vista has been pretty smooth. Gmail Notifier does not work on Vista. After reading some Google Groups posts, it doesn't sound like Google is going to fix this. That's not too big of a deal though. I use Google Talk anyways, and Crystal uses the Google Toolbar for Firefox. Both provide the same functionality.

A much bigger deal was iTunes. I could not get iTunes to make a secure connection to the iTunes Music Store, thus I could not authorize my computer. This prevented me from playing any songs that either Crystal or I had bought to play. That was a very big problem. I kept a cryptic error message about "Unknown error -9808."

I ran the iTunes Network Diagnostic (I didn't even know they had this!) It took me to a support page that suggested that I needed to make sure Internet Explorer had either SSL 3.0 or TLS enabled. I found it funny that I had to fiddle with Internet Explorer to get iTunes to work. But that was not the problem.

I turned off the Windows Firewall. No luck. I tried turning down IE's security settings as low as they can go. No luck. I tried telling Vista to run iTunes as an administrator. No luck.

Finally I found this article on Apple's support discussions. This sounded like it would not help, but I tried it anyways. I reduced the Maximum Transfer Unit on my router from 1500 to 1400. I restarted the router. Then I launched iTunes. Mysteriously I got a message from Windows Firewall saying that it had been blocking some iTunes functionality.

WTF!? I had turned Windows Firewall off. I had rebooted since I had done that, and got a complaint from Windows about having it turned off. And yet, it claimed it had been interfering with iTunes. It kindly asked me if I wanted to stop blocking iTunes, and I emphatically clicked in the affirmative. I then tried once again to sign in to the iTunes Music Store and voila!

I wish I could claim to understand what happened here. Did changing the MTU on my router really cause Windows to suddenly ask me about enabling iTunes functionality? Was it just same bizarre coincidence? Who knows. At least it is working. For now.