The battery on my Pearl 8100 died so I decided to replace it with a later model. I was excited about the Curve since it has a QWERTY keyboard. Over time, I missed this from my previous 8700c because I use my Blackberry to send several emails a day. I was also looking forward to the fact the device has GPS, and a better camera with flash.
The Curve is an excellent device like all the other Blackberries I have owed. It works pretty flawlessly for email, web, etc. It's very lightweight. Overall, I think the Curve is better than the Pearl.
I've raved before about how great the Blackberries are, and nothing in the Curve has changed my opinion. Rather than repeat all that I like about Blackberry, here are some things about this device you might not be aware of if you are looking to move up to one.
The 8700c came with a nice holster. The Curve doesn't come with such a holster so if you enjoy the holster like I did, you have to buy a 3rd party one. (Of course, the Pearl doesn't come with a cool holster either.)
The Curve has a 3.5mm stereo headphone jack so you can listen to music on it. Although, this sounds cool, I preferred the standard telephone headset jack instead because without this you have to use a Bluetooth headset. I have a good one, but sometimes it is also useful to use a wired headset. And my existing Blackberry wired headsets are now obsolete. I don't listen to music on my Curve because I can listen to music better on my iPod or laptop.
The GPS is not as useful as thought it would be. To use Telenav that comes with the Curve you have to pay an extra $10 a month so I haven't signed up for that. Its not clear to me to what extent apps like Google maps depend on the built in GPS, or are just using triangulation which doesn't require it. I have seem friends of mine bring up Google maps on their phones without GPS and I don't see an big benefit in the Curve's GPS or if Google is even taking advantage of it.
The Facebook mobile application for Blackberry is simple but also very useful for uploading photos and sending Facebook messages. I think Google maps, and Google sync (if you use Google calendar) are fairly essential. I also install YGo! and Beyond411 and while they are cool and have some utility are just not essential.
On the topic of third party software, I have some surprising battery life problems with the Curve. It is not uncommon to turn on the device and find the battery totally drained. I believe this may be due to some of the applications above which if left running totally drain the battery. The only way around this is to make sure to exit all these 3rd party apps after using them, and to strategically leave chargers at both home and work.
The Blackberry browser is fairly capable although I've realized that that CSS, Javascript, and tables are turned off by default which makes things look very plain. If you want to get more an iPhone -ish browsing experience you can also install Opera Mini. I have it, but I haven't found a big need to use it.
I have AT&T and I have an AT&T specific Curve complaint. The Curve has a Yahoo! Messenger application which is very cool, but AT&T will not allow it to work on their network. There are forum posts on how to hack you Curve to get it to work, but what a hassle. So if you can use a Curve on a network other than AT&T, you'll have a better experience than me.
Contact Hero is a new web based address book and contact manager optimized for mobile devices that I have developed. Please try the service and give me your feedback. Using Contact Hero you can:
Keep track of all your contacts from any PC or any Internet enabled
mobile device at mobile.contacthero.com
Link calls to make with contacts, and keep a Contact History
Use Blackberry or iPhone optimized versions
Import your contacts from Outlook, Google or Yahoo!
Today I became a Facebook developer and released my first Facebook application. My application is called “Trump Quotes†http://apps.facebook.com/trumpquotes. It is a collection of quotes by Donald Trump that you can paste to your Facebook profile and spread around the social graph. It’s nothing earth shattering, but a start. I wanted to get a feel as to how these apps work. The documentation on how to make a Facebook app is not so great at the moment so it actually took quite of a bit of experimentation to figure this all out. The app is build using Ruby on Rails, RFacebook, FBML and Mysql. If you are on Facebook, please connect with me if you have not already, and add Trump Quotes if you want.
It seems everywhere I go today, I see people showing off their iPhones. Of course, I know it is because of where I live, but they seem to be lying out on restaurant tables everywhere in the valley. At Mashup Camp 4 which I am attending this week, of course, there are a bunch of people with them.
I finally got to play with one yesterday for about 10 minutes. Honestly, I was not blown away. The screen is beautiful. The device is thin. And yet it is just huge compared to my Blackberry Pearl. I would really worry about dropping an iphone and damaging the screen. I wasn’t excited about the onscreen keyboard. I tried the safari browser. It is cool. I tried out the phone, calendar, camera and other features. They are nice but I didn’t see anything so revolutionary that inspires me to run out and spend $500 to $600 for one. Maybe if you never had a smart phone this would be amazing breakthrough, but otherwise for me I think it is just a fashion statement.
I am launching a new social website about phones, headsets, carriers and accessories at http://www.5thbar.com.
Please check it out. It has YouTube and eBay integration plus a news aggregator. I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have on it. Thanks!
For those interested, this site was developed using Ruby on Rails.
Last week I took my two daughters on a mission trip to build a house for poor family in Juarez Mexico through our church. The typical family we saw was headed by a single mother with three or more small children and surviving on $7-$10 per day. It was a really eye-opening experience! Our team of 13 people (half of which were under 14) flew to El Paso, Texas. We got picked up by a bus then driven over the border to the Mission Ministries “team center†located in one of the poorest parts of Juarez.
The team center is very nice relative to its environment. It's a compound with rooms, running water, air conditioning, electricity, dining hall, and a medical clinic. It's surrounded by tall wall with barbed wire, topped with broken glass, and with a guard dog. Because outside is not so nice. The homes in the neighborhood don't have running water. A lot of them are just made up of cardboard or pallets. The people burn old tires to keep warm in the winter. There are gangs walking around which make it unsafe to go out at night. It's dirty, there is garbage and debris everywhere, tremendous poverty and overall it's very sad.
The Mission Ministries team is just making an incredible difference. So far this year they’ve built about 45 homes for people in the area. Also and perhaps even more miraculous is the personal transformation of the people around this activity. Several of the local people working with us were former gang members, drug addicts, killers, etc. now they have devoted themselves to helping others.
Mission Ministries also provides free medical care to people in the area out of their clinic which is staffed by volunteers. We had a dentist who came with us who worked out of the medical clinic there while we were building the house. We only had one doctor with us, but other teams come with several doctors and nurses. In the afternoons, we were done building at the house (it was 105°F at the construction site) we came back to the medical clinic to help out. My daughters and some of the ladies on the trip gave manicures to the local women who were waiting to see the dentist. We also did some arts and crafts projects and played sports with the local kids.
If you have the opportunity to go yourself, or even to take your children, I highly recommend it. It was a tremendously rewarding personal experience. You will see the difference God can make in action. My kids left inspired to help out and anxious to return again. I posted some photos of the construction and time we spent at the clinic here.
Over the past year, friends have emailed me many videos from YouTube. This is the 21st century version of emailing a cartoon, joke or inspirational quote. I decided to make a playlist with 10 of the most interesting or funny ones I have received. Enjoy!
A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my desktop PC to Vista. In my experience, Windows needs to be wiped and reloaded about once a year to get rid of built-up crud and it was about time for my XP installation to be reloaded. Since I had a copy of Vista Ultimate and was going to have to reload XP anyway, I gave it a try. A couple of friends who are also considering this and asked me how it went.
I made complete copy of my C drive using DriveImage XML (freeware) in case something went wrong and I needed to revert. I ran the Vista Upgrade as I had read this totally wipes your Windows directory and copies over your XP stuff into Vista and there was no performance benefit from doing a fresh install. I got a lot of programs so I decided to try to save time doing this. In retrospect, I might do a fresh install next time.
One of my 2 video cards didn’t work at all under Vista so I had to throw it away and buy a new one $$.
Norton Antivirus doesn’t work either so I had to uninstall it and reload a fresh copy from Symantec site. The reinstall lost my license info so I had to reload that too. Annoying.
My HP 2600n color laser jet was not supported so I couldn’t print anymore. HP says they will have a driver in June 2007. A few weeks later I found the proper driver on another HP site (!) and was able to print.
QuickBooks 2006 is incompatible with Vista, so I had to order a new copy of QuickBooks 2007. Note: there is no upgrade pricing so you have to buy all over again. Thanks Intuit. $$$
Two programs I rely on: VMWare and Ultramon didn’t run under Vista. Fortunately, there are betas of these two out which support Vista so I was saved.
I had to go and download new native approved video, webcam, keyboard and mouse drivers from vendor sites even if the vendor was Microsoft in some cases. That didn’t make much sense to me.
I synced my Windows Mobile Smartphone using the new Windows Mobile Device Center. It tried to duplicate all my data between the Smartphone and Outlook. Unbelievably bad.
iTunes 7 will sometimes just stop playing working. No fix.
Console2 (another favorite) also will just stop working sometimes. No fix.
Overall, it took me a few days of messing with Windows Vista and some $$$ to get up and working again. It wasn't a disaster but not a great time either. It is no faster than XP on my machine. I am spending less time in Windows these days and more time running Ubuntu 7 which I dual boot with Vista.
