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My So Called Digital Life - Part II - The Love Lost

My New Lord
Today was the day of days. I drove from my office to the Glendale Cingular store, plunked down some money, will pay an early termination fee on Sprint, and I bought a Blackberry 8700c. Oh, and a pink razr for the wife.
I know, I know.

I wrote an article, that my friend Merlin linked to, about how much I loved my PPC-6700 from Sprint. I had used it to such an extent that it became a remote avatar of my digital life. This extension that fit in my hand, providing me a connection to the immaterial world that so consumes my life. It lead to friends, indie rock star acquaintances and more than a few trackbacks.

And now I have to say that the device that is my portable avatar has moved from a big MIcrosoft device to a moderately large RIM device. THe reasons are many, but are concentrated in the following:

1) Battery life. The PPC-6700 was around 6 hours. The 8700c is 2 days.
2) Screen readability outside - nil on the 6700, very nice on the 8700c
3) Stability

Basically, the 6700 is a brilliant device, but its a Windows device. It is very flashy, cool to show people, and HTC did an amazing job on the build quality. But 2-3 soft resets a day, lots and lots of screen delays, etc leads up to the realization that you are essentially relying on an underpowered, large, power-hungry Windows machine for your phone. It seems silly when you think of it like that.

So the 6700 will be ebayed (it makes a killer EVDO modem or GPS device) and my 8700c is now all pretty on my desk (along with a Motorola H700 headset).

So lets recap, and move forward. More than two months later, how is My So Called Digital Life shaping up.

E-Mail

The volume of e-mail I get daily has not decreased. In fact, because things are going rather well with work, they have radically increased, and increased in monetary value. By monetary value, I mean that the potential money earned from each e-mail (for the company, etc) has gone up to the point where one e-mail can pay for a year of remote e-mail access, sync services, scornful looks, etc.

mail
To wit: I get upwards of 500 actionable e-mails a day. That does not count the automated status updates from our ticketing system, or the various things I monitor pinging me to tell me that they executed their cron jobs OK.My e-mail all funnels into a Mailstreet hosted Exchange account. I used to funnel it into a 4smartphone account, but they don’t support BlackBerry Enterprise Service, so I had to give it up (sorry!). This doesn’t mean I don’t like 4smartphone though. After some scalability issues, they have gotten much better.Above, you can see my current e-mail organization. I have decided to go the zero-inbox route, and maintain a clear head through a clear inbox. The contents of these folders is self explanatory, I should hope. INBOX items go into Archive if there is nothing more to do on them, Followup if I need to respond, and Reference if the e-mail contains things that I need to keep handy. This includes travel itineraries, receipts, new account activations, etc.

The Blackberry is used in a similar fashion. I keep its inbox cleaned by filing into folders. To do so, I had to mark those folders as Redirected in the Blackberry desktop client. Once I did that, messages I file on the computers (in Entourage or Mail) are on the Blackberry. Unfortunately it doesn’t apply to pre-BES messages, so I’ll need to do a resync on Apple Mail later.

The zero-count inbox has worked really well for me, in terms of making sure I can keep focused and not be so consumed by what I MUST do, that I avoid doing anything.

Calendar

As I’m still using an Exchange server, you’d think I’d still use Groupcal, from Snerdware. You would be wrong! Groupcal is a really crappy product, and I’m very sad that I spent upwards of $120.00 on it. Instead, I’m now happy that Entourage uses iSync to sync to Address Book and iCal. This works really well surprisingly, complete with invites and such.

entourage sync

I disabled Address Book syncing as well, for this reason.

Of note: Entourage/iCal/Address Book syncing is real-time. You move an apt in iCal and it moves in Entourage and syncs to the server. Sweet.

Address Book

I still use Apple Address Book, but it syncs to Entourage and from there to Exchange. Its a bit more seamless than the weird, strange and unpredictable syncing direct from Address Book.

Yojimbo!

My friend and ally. I have now fully consumed myself in Yojimbo organization, with a modified GTD type infrastructure. Versus having a monolithic todo list, I decided to be more modal and fragment things up by task, project and end-state goal. I can’t show the contents of these folders, but trust me, it works. It syncs with .Mac seamlessly now, and all my machines remain in perfect harmony.

yojimbo!

Coming soon….. life with a Blackberry. How a nerd hacks a wonk device.

Comments 16

  1. Jeff Abbott wrote:

    Ethan:
    Thanks for posting your setup. This is very helpful to see how someone who works in a creative field is using a BlackBerry. I’m a writer, and some of my fellow writers swear by theirs, but I haven’t made the jump yet.

    Regards,
    Jeff

    Posted 21 Apr 2006 at 6:21 am
  2. Robert Andrews wrote:

    I have just about had enough of my O2 Xda mini S (same phone, I believe). I’m looking around. Keeping tabs on the Sony Ericsson P990. Maybe even a mere mortal’s handset that actually has a decent camera and is usable…

    Posted 21 Apr 2006 at 7:54 am
  3. Alex wrote:

    Your iCal/Address Book to Entourage to Hosted Exchange to BlackBerry solution - assuming it works well - seems a lot better than direct sync via PocketMac. Ironic that an app designed to do one thing is worse at it than a a group of apps that happen to offer enough functionality that you can cobble them together in this manner.

    Now the question is: is it worth an extra $10/month for me (now that PocketMac is “working”)?

    How does your set-up support multiple calendars (or does it)?

    Posted 24 Apr 2006 at 11:34 pm
  4. grayskull wrote:

    I’m about to toss my T Mobile MDA in teh bin and switch to a BB 8700. any chance you can give us an update on your experiences, any pro’s/con’s to consider? cheers.

    Posted 23 May 2006 at 9:39 am
  5. digital camera wrote:

    To my disappointment, the RIM BlackBerry 8700c uses a proprietary instant-messaging client, and Bluetooth is limited to use with headsets and car kits :(

    Posted 18 Jul 2006 at 3:13 am
  6. Ted Martin wrote:

    How do you select which calendar you want it to synch to? Mine won’t do that, and it says I have all the updates…

    Posted 26 Oct 2006 at 4:59 pm
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Trackbacks & Pingbacks 6

  1. From Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » Mail.app/Blackberry/iCal/Address Book/Yojimbo on 21 Apr 2006 at 4:48 am

    [...] Ethan Kaplan has bought a Blackberry . [...]

  2. From alexking.org: Blog > Viable Mobile Platforms on 27 Apr 2006 at 7:42 am

    [...] Some of the new WM devices have great hardware. The Treo 700W and the HTC designs (with the slide-out keyboards) are really quite good (though some have fatal flaws). Unfortunately, you can’t get around the WM OS. [...]

  3. From alexking.org: Blog > Free-Busy? on 11 Aug 2006 at 2:55 am

    [...] Ethan does his BlackBerry to multiple-desktop sync solution using a hosted exchange account. Maybe that is the best option at this point2 - then the only missing piece of the puzzle is the public free-busy, which maybe I solve via some of my own code. [...]

  4. From me2 Findoo.info » Free-Busy? on 19 Aug 2006 at 4:41 pm

    [...] Ethan does his BlackBerry to multiple-desktop sync solution using a hosted exchange account. Maybe that is the best option at this point2 - then the only missing piece of the puzzle is the public free-busy, which maybe I solve via some of my own code. [...]

  5. From portable gps with route list on 13 Feb 2008 at 7:27 pm

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