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A week of Blackberry Bliss. After ditching my 6700 on Sprint for a Blackberry 8700c on Cingular, things have gotten much smoother in terms of my information flow. The biggest issue with the 6700 is that while I loved the device (mostly), I could never fully invest myself in the device because I was always operating in a Chinese-water-torture state of fear about the battery. It’s like living under the spectre of nuclear war, except not as melodramatic. I was often thinking, “I shouldn’t be using the EVDO radio so much!” or “people, please stop e-mailing me, my battery!”
Operating in this state is counterintuitive. A device is supposed to ease anxiety, not further it through its own inability to regulate electron flow in a Lithium Ion battery properly. Honestly now. The Blackberry though, as soon as I turned it on, hooked it into Mailstreet and decked it out… wham. Bliss.
Google Local was one of the killer apps. Berry411 the other. The other that I haven’t talked about is ldokorroMobile SSH. This program is a simple SSH program, with local buffering or live entering into the server. Saving a profile is easy, and once on the server, response over EDGE is pretty damn good. This program came in handy when I was in New York, as when I was at a dinner in NY, I could quickly check server status, run WHOIS queries, dig zone checks, etc. Very geeky. Very necessary.
The other Killer App for the BB is Blackberry Messenger. This is a free program from RIM, that you can get by going to the homepage on the device. It warns that it doesn’t work on Cingular. They lie! BBM uses the PIN numbers of devices to communicate, and is like a souped up AIM on the device level. You can see when others are typing, if they’ve read your message and also set away messages. The other cool feature is PING, which causes a remote users device to vibrate, to get their attention. I’d like a setting for PAIN.
Band of the Week
Tally Hall is a band from MI, which is fantastically strange. It’s like Queen mixed with Oingo Boingo mixed with Of Montreal, but with less twee. Totally amazing.
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