Our family of four has four BlackBerrys and no landline. One of my sons was sitting in the bath texting and the screen on his Bold 9700 went dead. Probably condensation. We couldn't awaken it, though the phone was running. So we went off to the mall to get a new BlackBerry. At Walmart the BlackBerry Torch model with no keyboard was being offered for $0 with a two year commitment. But the stand that would have held the display model was empty. The salesman said his BlackBerry rep was in the day before, dropped off five devices, and they were now sold. He didn't know when they'd get more. At Target we learned they don't sell BlackBerrys. BestBuy had the Bold for a Spring which we aren't using. For AT&T there was one lone model, the Torch with keyboard for a $50 upgrade price. AT&T's own store only carries the Bold for $199. We went home. I ordered a Curve from AT&T online. My impression of this little sojourn? BlackBerry is obvious struggling to
even get shelf space. Meanwhile, it launches a new phone...in Indonesia. But I'm sure the aspiration there is for an iPhone (though I've heard from an Indonesian friend that sometimes only BBM will get through, not even standard text messages).
BlackBerry really is the new feature phone. They effectively don't have a smart phone and hardly have a smartphone offering. And that means they don't have much of an offering in North America because feature phones here are end of life.
But I still do love my BlackBerry. I was using it to navigate somewhere because BlackBerry Traffic beats Google Navigation on my Android ever time. Better directions. And more reliable connections (thanks also to Verizon vs. T-Mobile). So, I wanted to use my Android to get on a conference call while my BB Traffic did it's thing. No go. First, I had updated the calendar event
in Google calendar from my computer browser an hour before and it still hadn't pushed to my Android (but Google had pushed it to my BlackBerry)! When it finally appear on my Andoird, and I clicked the phone number in "location" where I usually store it, the phone app did open up but it didn't recognize the x123 for extension. And for some reason the phone app kept freezing and wouldn't make a call. Pull over. Switch phones. Try to get the Android to navigate. Nexus S can't find GPS. I make the call with ease on my BlackBerry with a few simple clicks of the REAL KEYBOARD and I remember why I'm still stuck with those Canadians from RIM.
I rented a Ford C-MAX the other day. It's Ford answers to the Prius, but with much more power and much lower fuel economy. It's a very nice vehicle, although I much prefer the simple and sparse aesthetic of the dashboard of the Prius. One feature of the Ford is an almost photo-realistic graphic of leaves, a feature that the user can chose to display to the right of the speedometer. As you drive more efficiently this "Efficiency Leaves" game will add leaves to the picture. As you drive less efficiently, leaves will gradually drop away. The challenge with this attempt to graphically show your efficiency is that in choosing a realistic image of a branch, Ford also kept to the random appearance of a natural tree. Consequently, it is very hard to understand at a glance how well you're doing. It's not obvious whether your tree is full of leaves, and therefore that you're winning the efficiency game, or whether your tree is sparse.
Contrast this with the Fitbit which uses a less realistic image to represent progress. After a few minutes of use, it's quite clear how large you're growing your plant and therefore how much progress you've made.
A hard drive on my Iomega Storcenter ix2-200 drive died the other day. This is a simple unit that runs two mirrored hard drives for data protection. Nowhere, anywhere could I find information about how to replace the drive, except for a complicated PDF that didn't seem to quite match my unit. Assuming that in some way I'd figure it out, I went to BestBuy, grabbed a replacement drive (Seagate 1TB "Barracuda" desktop drive), and started to open the Storcenter. Super easy. Just pull two screws on the base, slip out the defective drive, a few more screws for the mounting enclosure, replace drive, and voila, push it back in and tighten it up. Turning on the device within minutes it was re-mirroring the drives.
