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.
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!
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.
