David’s Musings

I’m still loving my Blackberry Bold, but I’m onto my second. A week ago, I noticed I couldn’t receive emails. I could send, but not receive. Via WiFi it was fine, but via the mobile network, 3G or EDGE, no.

Customer service down the drain?

I called AT&T several times during the same day and got the usual stock responses: restart, take out your battery and wait 30 seconds etc. I don’t presume to be a Blackberry expert, but I have had several Blackberries over six years. It seemed I knew more than the operators and it became very exhausting.

AT&T were stumped. In the end they said it was my IT department’s problem as I was on BES. It was only after three hours with our Desktop Team and a conference call directly with RIM a hardware failure was diagnosed.

AT&T advised me to return the unit to a store for a straight swap and put a note on my account that I was going to do that the same day. OK I thought, I’ll do it on the way home.

I went to my local store and they refused to swap it as it was over four weeks old. OK, you have policies AT&T, but my Blackberry is my lifeline when it comes to work, I bought a brand new Bold from you five weeks ago, you sell the Bold as true business tool, and, by the way, this phone isn’t that inexpensive. The two assistants stood there, leaning on their workstation with their arms folded in a ‘not my problem’ stance. They even refused to look at my account on their PC when I told them a note had been placed on the system.

The store told me to go through their warranty exchange programme. Therefore, I was without my Blackberry over the Christmas season - which is just when I needed it if there was a major incident at work while I was out on vacation.

The AT&T store should have said, sorry Mr Burden, we cannot believe your $500+ unit we bill as the ultimate business tool has failed in five weeks, here’s a new one. No questions asked.

Am I wrong?

I’ve been waiting a long time for this, but it’s finally arrived. The SlingPlayer Mobile for Blackberry. I installed it onto my Bold and within minutes I was up and running. A very solid and polished application. For those of you who aren’t aware of Sling, take a look at their site here. A Sling box connects to your tuner (in my case my Comcast DVR cable box) and allows you to watch and control said box from anywhere in the world.

I have a trusty original Sling box from a few years ago and credit to Sling, they still support and maintain it. In fact, I’ve just downloaded some new firmware.

The application itself for the Blackberry is a little on the large size at around 1.5MB. If you haven’t got a newer type of Blackberry, you should even go there. Once I installed, I was using it quite quickly. I had one hitch in that you have to use the Windows version of SlingPlayer to configure mobile viewing - you can’t do this with the Mac. So, I had to go and drag out my trusty laptop running Vista! Once I had configured the software, the Slingbox and my Blackberry - I was nearly there! A quick tweak of my router to allow the correct port through for remote viewing and I was there.

Sling make this really easy for you with great FAQs, online help, video - and specific walkthroughs for various routers. The application itself works like a dream over wifi - and also over 3G. It can even at a push with a full signal scrape by on EDGE/GPRS - but not well.

I’m extremely pleased with this and it was well worth the wait - I’m just waiting to see how long it is before mobile operators start getting grumpy about bandwidth…

After a faulty start (and still some teething problems) I have eventually got into the virtual world of Sony Playstation Home. The icon appeared automatically this evening, and after a download, install and accepting around three terms and conditions screens, it all fired up.

I first had to pick my avatar. I was tempted to make it look dashing and cool, but my conscience got the better of me and I tried to keep it as true to life as possible.

Once in, I arrived at my private sea-side apartment. Very relaxing overlooking the quay. I then ventured into the town, hit the stores, played pool, had a go at bowling, then looked at some of the art work.

It seemed pretty busy in the virtual world this evening and it looks to be very popular.

Here I am sat on a bench in the plaza watching the world go by… (if anyone is looking for me my handle is NMANSA)

You can find out more about Playstation Home here. Below there’s a short video clip of me in the Plaza for the first time having a boogie with some other randoms…!

Very excited to actually get to use the Playstation virtual world, Home this evening. It’s been a long time coming. Sony first mentioned the concept around two years ago. Today is the first day in open Beta testing. However, one small glitch, it doesn’t work.

Hopefully, Sony will work quickly to get these servers up and running soon, otherwise it may turn into a huge embarrassment.

One week in, and I absolutely love my Blackberry Bold from AT&T. With many delays, it was a long time coming, but worth the wait.

This is my eighth Blackberry which seems a bit greedy, and it’s only been six months since I bought the Curve, which is a little strange I admit, but, hey, I’m a glutton for new gadgets and technology.

The feel and usability of the Bold is fantastic. There have been many reviews already done, so I don’t want to replicate. You notice the speed and stability more than anything. There is more internal memory to let your applications run smoothly and load quickly. The screen is fantastic and you can watch video in glorious detail. I slapped in a 8GB card and have some films and television to watch when I’m on the move. The keypad is quiet, solid and responsive.

The improved Blackberry Browser tied with the crystal sharp screen gives a great web-experience. With 3G you can watch streaming clips from YouTube. If you take photos and video, it is now very speedy to take these off onto your PC or iMac via USB compared with previous Blackberry models.

AT&T and Blackberry put some good thought into the UI and the look and feel. The themes are crisp and fresh. I seem to have Wifi and Bluetooth switched on at all times. Even by doing that, the battery lasts a good 1.5 days with pretty heavy use. I have to say even though the device is 3G, I don’t notice it making a huge difference with normal Blackberry use. Emails come through the same as the previous models. When you browse, you don’t notice a huge difference either. However, if you download attachments, pictures or applications - that’s when you do notice it making a huge difference.

The camera is the same as my old Curve, 2MP, so no real change there. But again, because of the processing speed of the Bold, the videos I record are crisp and not jumpy

I’ve found two bugs in the software: On one occasion, the red light stayed on constantly and I had to reboot - and the other was that the colours of the writing of the keys in the calculator app sometimes act strangly when pressed. Apart from that, everything else is fine.

The only thing I don’t like too much is the specially commisioned music themes for the Bold by Stewart Copeland. They sound like a two-legged cat walking over my daughters Schoenhut (you might have to Google that!)

Blackberry Bold specifications:

• Size - Length: 114mm, Width: 66mm, Thickness: 14mm
• Weight (with battery) - 133g (same as the 88xx series. I can attest to it!)
• Memory - 1GB on-board (storage) and 128 MB Flash (applications)
• Battery - 1500mAhr lithium cell
• Est. Battery Life - Standby: 13 days, Talk Time: 5 hours
• Network Support - UMTS: 2100 / 1900 / 850MHz, GSM: 1900 / 1800 / 900 / 850 MHz, GPRS, EDGE and HDSPA networks
• Wi-Fi - 803.11a/b/g enabled
• Display - HVGA, 480 x 320 pixels, Transmissive TFT LCD, supports over 65k colors
• Media Player, Video Support - DivX 4, Div X 5 & 6 are partially supported, XviD is partially supported, H.263, H.264 and WMV3
• Media Player, Audio Support - .3gp, MP3, WMA9 (.wma/.asf), WMA9 Pro/WMA 10, MIDI, AMR-NB, Professional AAC/AAC+/eAAC+
• Media Player, Audio - BlackBerry Media Sync allows you to transfer your desktop iTunes music to your BlackBerry
• Camera - 2.0MP, 5 x digital zoom (with flash)
• GPS - internal GPS with extended ephemeris
• Bluetooth - Bluetooth v2.0, all the normal stuff and Bluetooth Stereo Audio via A2DP and AVCRP
• USB Port - Enables charging and high-speed data synchronizations via USB
• Browser - HTML browsing, view movies/clips from websites built for mobile streaming, RSS feed support
• Cost with USA AT&T from $299.99 for 2 year contract or upgrade with rebate - the no commitment price $549.99 (as at 20 Nov 08)

Someone commented to me today in the office that I hadn’t blogged for some considerable time. Firstly, I was surprised he’d heard about my blog, let alone even read it. I don’t get delusions of grandeur from his comments, I just thought, "Wow - this internet thing really is far reaching", (as if I didn’t know that already)

Something like a blog takes a lot of upkeep, (it’s been well over a month since I last blogged. The gap between the posts before that was only a week)

Then you have Facebook, Flickr, Vimeo, Friendfeed, Twitter, etc. Perhaps it’s time for me to rationalise? If I was to keep all this afloat it would take a fair chunk of my day.

That’s my point. Times change, priorities change. Workloads change. It really is a full-time job. Priorities and workloads have changed for me. I’m so behind:

• I haven’t updated my 365day Flickr project for well over a week. I have the photos, but haven’t uploaded them
• I haven’t ducked into Facebook for a long time now
• I Twitter regularly as I can do that easily on the move in downtime via my Blackberry
• I haven’t encoded and uploaded my backlog of video to put on Vimeo for a long time
• My career related networking sites such as Linkedin are getting out-of-date
• The photos I’ve taken over the last few weeks are backing up on my memory cards, rather than being edited and uploaded

It’s all mounting up. Have you thought about giving up some parts of social networking? If so, what are you cutting back on?

Over the weekend, I took the plunge and updated the firmware on my Blackberry 8310 to the new Blackberry OS 4.5. This is obviously not recommended as there could have been all sorts of issues, but, for now, things are looking pretty good and pretty stable.

I wanted to upgrade as, (a) I’m impatient, and (b) the upgrade brings massively improved functionality - the main ones being, better media player, video recorder, HTML email, better user interface, availability search for calendar invites.

So how did I do it? Here’s how. And please, do not contact me if you have problems. I don’t recommend this unless you think you know what you’re doing!

These instructions are only for owners with a Blackberry 8310. I am on the AT&T network in the USA. This method has not been tested by me on any other network or anywhere else in the world. Also, to get the full functionality of things such as HTML email, your BIS service must be running BIS 2.5 - but I believe they all are now.

This process may remove any applications you have installed and may remove your corporate policy if you have one. Be warned.

Also, start to finish, this process can take an hour or more. Once you start, you can’t stop, so make the time.

1. Ensure you have the latest Blackberry Desktop software installed. You can get it here: http://na.blackberry.com/eng/services/desktop/

2. Install the Blackberry Desktop software.

3. Download the latest OS firmware from here, the only place to offer it right now - the Germany Vodafone site. (By the way, the official release by US operators is looking to be released around September if you can wait that long)

4. Install the OS firmware download.

5. Plug in your Blackberry, your device will be identified and the upgrade process should begin. The process, as I’ve said already, can take a long, long time. Lots of rebooting and white screens are normal. Be patient.

If you end up with a white screen with small icons and the number 507/543, simply connect to Desktop Manager again and run the application loader once again.

Good luck and enjoy! I’m certainly loving the new look.

A friend of mine Paul Hammond has written a great blog post “What Is Your Backup Strategy?” that details his horrific weekend attempting to claw back his entire digital life including nine years of photos and 65Gb of iTunes songs.

It got me thinking, how would my family feel if my PC and hard-disk died tonight? Probably nothing much initially, but after a couple days when the dust settled, you’d get that horrible feeling in the pit of your stomach that you’d lost your whole life to a hard-disk failure.

Even though I do a weekly backup of my PC to an external hard-drive and I upload my pictures to Flickr, what would happen if my PC and external-drive died? Unfortunately for Paul, his 1TB hard-drive died without warning (as you’d expect)

Just at a rough glance this evening, I have:

• Around 780Gb of information on my PC
• 90Gb of photos that go back to 1999
• An iTunes folder storing 94Gb of music and video
• Email archives of 16Gb stretching back to 1998
• Websites I’ve produced racking up 600Mb
• 160Gb of family video
• And disappointingly (because the filesize is so small), but probably most importantly, 920Mb of family and personal documents

On Paul’s recommendation, tonight I signed up for Mozy. I didn’t want to leave it another day. It’s a piece of software that sits on your PC and copies your important files to a secure, remote server for safekeeping.

I’ll sleep more soundly tonight.

UPDATE - 4 August 2008: This evening, my iMac finished it’s first backup. Just over three months since it started. That was a long time! It took this time to backup 73,000 files which weighed in at 188.2GB. However, the incremental backups that are happening now are taking around seven minutes.

Today I gave up on my Linksys WRT300N router. Over the past few days I’ve decided that my poor connectivity in the house, coupled with dropped online games with my Playstation 3, must be down to the router.

This is my second WRT300N, the first one went back last year as it died. Before that, I had a Linksys WRT54GS router - and swapping back to that for a few days actually gave more stability but slower connection speeds and less range (as you’d expect)

The D-Link DIR-655 router I bought today seems to be a stellar improvement on the Linksys. It has more configuration items, but the way in which it has automatic Quality of Service (QoS) seems to be a winner - especially when I’m playing online. No more disconnects or game stalling, even when Sara, my wife, is also online surfing da web. The range seems to be more wide and long too.

I also have to say, from a support perspective, D-Link have it ’sussed’.

Easy install CD, a great online help site and a good user interface within the router menu options itself.

So far, the D-Link seems many times better than the Linksys. However, to be fair the Linksys router is nearly two years older than my current one even though they still both support draft-N.

I guess that’s the price you can pay when you’re an early adopter of technology…

I updated my WordPress blog software to version 2.3.3 this evening and have run into problems. It seems my heavily customised templates are not compatible with the new version, so I’ve had to roll back to plain ones. Until I get the old look and feel back, I’ll have to stick with this. Please bear with me. Humph.

I was looking at my Blackberry today and started thinking how many applications I now use that I find indispensable that are not part of the standard install.

I’m going to list them here to share - but also as a handy reference for me to download these applications in the future if I need them!

All Google Blackberry applications

You can get all the current Blackberry applications from one single point. This download will help you configure a Google installer which will keep all the applications up-to-date going forward. You can select which applications you wish to install and those you don’t. You can download it here:

(From your Blackberry Browser) http://www.google.com/m/products

The applications I have installed on my Blackberry are Google Maps, Google Search and Mail by Google. I don’t seem to get any value out of the others.

Note: If you have a hosted email account with Google, (as I do), you need to download the Mail application separately here:

(From your Blackberry Browser) http://m.google.com/a

Viigo

Viigo is an application to centralise and sync your RSS feeds. It’s probably the application I use the most on the Blackberry. I recommend it highly - and you can download it here:

(From your Blackberry Browser) http://www.getviigo.com

You need a free account to access this service. You can setup one through your Blackberry or on their website at http://www.viigo.com

Facebook

If you like to follow your friends and family, Facebook is available for your Blackberry. The application truly integrates with your Blackberry and shows messages received in your status bar along with normal email messages

(Browser install via USB) http://na.blackberry.com/eng/devices/features/soci…

(From your Blackberry Browser - select the Facebook download) http://mobile.blackberry.com

Twitter (TwitterBerry)

If you want to update your Twitter status on-the-move without using your SMS function, you should consider TwitterBerry. TwitterBerry also offers you the function to list out Friends and Public timelines

(From your Blackberry Browser) http://www.orangatame.com/ota/twitterberry/

Yahoo Go!

Yahoo Go! gives you access to your Yahoo account, email, Flickr, RSS, Sport, Finance, Weather and Maps and is certainly a polished product. The download is not small but can be downloaded over the air at:

(From your Blackberry Browser) http://go.get.yahoo.com

Blackberry applications

Blackberry have various promotions and recommendations available to download via your phone by pointing your Blackberry browser to: http://mobile.blackberry.com

TV Guide (USA)

To download an excellent TV Guide application point your Blackberry here: http://tvguide.handmark.com

So, those are the applications I use - any I’ve missed, or any you cannot do without?

I haven’t posted for a while, so I thought I’d make a few technology predictions for 2008. I’ll check back on this post in January 2009 and see how close - or far - I’ve been:

Apple iPhone

I don’t actually see a new iPhone being launched during 2008. There’s lots of speculation around it, but I do feel Apple are some way away in bringing out a second version with something like 3G. The first version still has to appear in APAC markets, so until it does, I don’t see Apple releasing the next. My other prediction is that they’ll realise some killer apps, plus the long awaited Microsoft ActiveSync technology to allow the iPhone to work with corporate Exchange email

Sony PS3 Home

Sony will release their long-awaiting virtual reality world, Home, to replace the cross-media bar (XMB)

Blackberry handsets

Blackberry will reveal a new handset that will have a longer, wider screen. However, I don’t believe it will have a touch screen as predicted - but a folding or movable keyboard. Blackberry never bring out phones with a camera, GPS and WiFi packaged together - they always mix it up - but I believe the next generation of phone will have all of these - but still probably be GPRS not 3G

Offline browsing, web-to-go

We are going to see more use of offline browsing tools and application in the next year such as Google Gears, Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight. There will be more opportunity for offline browsing and then syncing-up your sessions and work once you’re back online

Apple Reduced Size Laptop

I see Apple creating a new small laptop with a screen of less than 12 inches and weighing in pretty light. Perhaps this new mini-laptop will have a touch screen such as the iPhone. With new Intel chips on their way such as Silverthorne that are notable for their very small size, speed, computing power and very low power consumption, Apple will be well placed in this area. These minature laptops will probably pave the way for a new iPhone flavour - but not until 2009 at least.

Sony have brought out an excellent Playstation 3 firmware update for a Christmas present for gamers. Version 2.10 gives many more features, but the best by far is the ability to now play DivX movies over your home network.

I am now going to encode all my DVDs into DivX and store them on my home PC’s external hard-drive. Now I have my own media center DVD library that can stream from my PC to my PS3. I’ve never used my PS3 so much since I bought it. The ability to just select any DVD or film I have from a menu and play it is superb.

Other functions the firmware update offers are voice changer and a new pattern for the visual player.

Find out more from the Sony PS3 site here

An exciting day for technical developments today. Google have released IMAP support for their Gmail and Google Applications. This is a godsend and I will explore more over the next few days. Also, RIM Blackberry announced today that they have created a Blackberry Facebook application. I received a customised download link from the Blackberry Owners Lounge this afternoon, have installed it - and will now explore.

Download the Facebook software from Blackberry here to install via your USB lead.

Google IMAP FAQs

I hate to be beaten to something techy and good, but my work colleague Dean today pointed me towards Yahoo! Go 2.0 for the Blackberry. I have a Pearl and he has the 8800.

One quick mobile over-the-air install later I was suitably impressed. This is a client that sits on your Blackberry and links and syncs with your Yahoo! account.

You can access your email, create an RSS list and links nicely through to your Flickr account, Yahoo! Maps etc. I don’t have GPS on my Blackberry, but Dean has - and his position was plotted up to about 1 yard on the map. Very cool. We were actually outside our staff restaurant having lunch under a green umbrella. The dot indicating his position on the map was a green dot. Dean, it was futile attempt to sell the idea I would think the map was a live picture…

The interface is very polished for an application on the Blackberry - however, it’s quite a chunky application weighing in around at a 800K install.

Nice one Yahoo! I think you’re doing lots of cool things right now but they somehow don’t get the visibility they deserve.