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.

Black Friday

Yesterday my wife convinced me to go shopping with her and her sister. Normally I dismiss the idea of shopping on Black Friday, smugly stating that people should just buy everything online. Long lines, supply shortfalls (artificial or not,) and the like are all just signs of inefficient markets that will be replaced by the ruthless efficiency of e-commerce. Somehow Crystal talked me in to hitting the mall at 7 AM...

One amusing thing to me is the bait-n-switch items. These are the "limited" quantity items that are offered at a huge discount (do stores actually take a loss on these things?) in order to get lots of people in the store. The store then runs out quickly, so customers wind up buying other, more expensive items. This year's bait-n-switch special was definitely GPS units. Not only did every big-box store out there have sub $200 GPS units in limited quantities, but places that don't normally sell GPS had them as well. Get your GPS at Long's Drugs or Sportsmart, woo hoo!

Black Friday was actually a lot of fun. My niece has managed various American Eagle stores for the last ten years or so, thus I have a lot of empathy for the folks who work on Black Friday. They all seemed to be in a good mood yesterday, and I had a good time joking around with people.

Black Friday had a dark moment for me though. I managed to drop my Blackberry in a (thankfully clean) toilet. I fished it out quickly, and took the battery out of it. I waited a few hours, and it booted it up. The keyboard was crazy though. Sometimes it would not type at all, but other times keys would be entered without me touching anything. So I took the battery back out and left it out over night. This morning everything is working good as new! What a relief!

Yesterday ended on a very bright note. We are going to Florida for Christmas this year, so my wife decided to give me an early present: a Nintendo Wii. She didn't want to try and hide it from me in the luggage, and this way we got to play it with our family in Bakersfield. I am happy to say that I have a sore shoulder this morning from playing Wii Tennis late last night... She asked me if I wanted other games for it, but I really did not expect a Wii and had no idea what games are supposed to be good on it. I will probably get Madden for it, just because I used to love Madden on the PS2 and Gamecube. Guitar Hero looks like a lot of fun, too. I have basically taken the last 3.5 years off from playing video games, as I stopped having time for stuff like that when we started having babies. I'm not sure how much time I will have to play it now either, maybe once I finish my book :-)

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...

Tetris and the iPhone

I really shouldn't write about the iPhone. There's way too much being written about it. But I was sitting outside today, waiting for somebody to call me back on my cell phone. I was a little bored so I went to Blackberry's portal site. I browsed some games, and noticed Tetris. So I downloaded the trial version to my phone and started playing it.

That's when I realized that such a thing would not be possible on the iPhone and that just seemed silly. Oh, that's right somebody just needs to do an AJAXy Tetris web application that doesn't use Java or Flash... Ok, so somebody has already done that and maybe it will play nice on the iPhone. But you get my point. The limitations of not being able to install software on a device that is supposedly running a full blown operating system (OSX) is just ridiculous.

And in case Steve Jobs asks, Tetris did not cause my Blackberry to crash and it did not bring down the Verizon Wireless network.

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...

Blackberry 8830

Well, well, well Happy Father's Day to me! My wife and kids bought me a Blackberry 8830. It works on both Verizon's CDMA network here and GSM networks in Europe. Should come in handy when we go to Rome.

I'm happy to report that the 8830 syncs beautifully using Pocket Mac, which is free for Blackberry owners, and runs GMail, Google Maps, and Opera Mini flawlessly. Forget the iPhone!