BlackBerry Bold live at AT&T? NOT!

Everyone in the blogosphere who is at all a RIM fanboy is talking about how AT&T has gone live with a BlackBerry Bold website page. They have NOT. They've allowed a messed up, partially complete page to exist out the wild for days. Look at this thing (LINK) on the left. The page is a complete mess! The idea that the executives at AT&T would allow what is their most important phone launch to languish for DAYS with an unfinished web . . . I'm speechless. The most junior Internet wannabe mogul working out of his parents' basement would fire himself if he allowed himself to let such a thing out in the wild! Shows the complete and utter chasm between a company like AT&T and Apple. Steve Jobs must be just dieing for the day when he can separate himself from these amateurs! An intern from a community college could do a better job of management.

OK. Correction. The page loads fine in Explorer. But Firefox 3.0 produces the above mess. My comments above still apply.

How Google Maps "My Location" works

If you want to know how Google Maps on a mobile device works, even if you don't have GPS in your device (like iPhone1), there's a new post on one of the Google blogs that explains everything: LINK.

Folder Sharing Options, Mac and PC

There are an increasing number of folder sharing options out there, it seems. And with the announcement yesterday of the new Apple .Me offering, which is launching in July, the opportunities for platform independent computer use increase greatly.

In my opinion, the most significant announcement by Apple yesterday wasn't the iPhone 3Q (aka iPhone2) but .Me. It will allow for wireless syncing of Macs, PCs and iPhones (running 2.0 software). More about that in a subsequent post. For now, here's a quick review of three of the other options available for synchronizing files between computers.

First, the old standby, Groove (LINK). Purchased by Microsoft and now part of the Office suite, it's a program that I use daily but unfortunuately is likely to be eclipsed by other offerings in the future.

Also purchased by Microsoft is FolderShare (LINK). It's been expected for a while that they would be subsumed under the Microsoft Live banner, and indeed they finally have. Their old site interface is gone and a new monicker is attached, "Windows Live FolderShare". Happily, it continues to offer Mac/PC file sharing. It will be interesting whether the .Me offer supplants and supercedes FolderShare.

A new offering, about which I was unfamiliar until today but which just got my attention via a BlackBerry blog is SugarSync (LINK). Also Mac/PC, it's no surprise that they stepped up their campaign after the launch of .Me. Perhaps this is, to some extent, the option for users who don't use iPhones and are still commited to BlackBerry. Haven't used it yet but I'll be taking a look.

Apple .Me is BlackBerry Enterprise Server for the Rest of Us

The new Apple .me application has been dubbed by Apple "Exchange for the rest of us" as in Microsoft Exchange. Launching in mid July, it is aimed at users who have a Mac at home, use an iPhone and have a PC at work and want to sync calendar and contacts between those three platforms. But really it's also "Enterprise Server for the rest of us" as in BlackBerry Enterprise Server.

Enterprise Server, if you don't know, is a piece of software that sits on top of an Exchange Server and manages BlackBerrys within the enterprise. It is the only way that you can get wireless sync of calendar and contacts between desktop machines and your BlackBerry.

But with .Me, finally without the use of either Exchange or Blackberry Enterprise Server, you're able to sync your calendar and contacts wirelessly. Not being able to do this with the previous iPhone seemed to me a painful omission. To be able to now accomplish this through a simple web-based system as the link between Macs, PCs and iPhones is a nail in the BlackBerry coffin.

BlackBerry has made a minimal attempt to create a small business (as in really small business) or home version of its Enterprise Server with a product called BlackBerry Unite! (LINK) but it still requires the use of a dedicated, always on desktop machine. And they've only launched it in Spain and Canada (though if you're really tricky you can download the software and apparently it does work on other carriers, outside those two countries). The idea that BlackBerry is requiring small business or home users to set up their own server for the cloud is crazy!

I love my BlackBerry and want to get a BlackBerry Bold but this wireless .Me option sorely tempts me. It should tempt any small business user as well.

"Apple will continue to penetrate the small and medium business market much more heavily and aggressively than it has been able to do so previously with this Exchange integration, but as far as larger enterprise, we still see RIM as the standard,” said Mike Abramsky, an analyst with RBC Dominion Securities." Globeinvestor.com LINK

Sure RIM is the standard for now, but iPhone is going to be a highly effective wedge that will, I suspect, rapidly penetrate upwards, from the sole proprieter and small business user on up.

The brilliant Honda diesel I want

Honda is supposed to be introducing their 2.2 liter diesel in 2009, in the Acura TSX of all cars, 50 states legal and without the urea injection system (yes, you heard that right) that cars like Mercedes will require to meet emissions standards. But in Europe you've been able to buy that engine for a while, in a brilliant Honda Civic, unlike any Honda Civic we get here in the United States. Of all the cars in the world I could have, this would be right there at the top of the list.

Looks like a Renault!

There's an amusing take on the car, from last year's Jalopnik (LINK), as well as an article on hypermiling this car and the massive Audi Q7 diesel in which they got 70mpg in the Honda and 35mpg in the Audi. Their point: all the bellyaching from US manufacturers (including Toyota but notably not Honda) that they don't have the technology to get such mileage is complete and utter bs (LINK).

I love the look of an old Miata with the headlights up

MacBook and cellular modem

I'm sitting here on the train and working on my lovely lovely lovely Lenovo X61s running it's cellular modem. Yes it's bloody expensive, but it's life blood! Worth every drop of the $60 a month I pay. And I'm wondering, WHAT besides Mac OS X does this give up to an Apple MBAir? Nothing. And it's a 4 year old design at least.

Apple HAS to launch a MacBook with built-in cellular modem or at least a slot on June 9. HOW can it be called the Air if it has to use a modem with a dongle??!!