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?

The Daily Mail newspaper has written a terrible article about Twitter and I thought I’d comment. The title of the article was How boring: Celebrities sign up to Twitter to reveal the most mundane aspect of their lives. How wrong could they possibly be? They completely missed the point I feel. (I hesitated actually linking to their site as it might drive traffic there, but did anyway!)

The article which took two people to write 24 paragraphs basically suggested that anyone who uses Twitter is a saddo. To be honest, the traditional media are feeling extremely squeezed with the massive uptake of social new media.

The fact of the matter, is that Twitter is a extensively used service, that, at the last guess put the number of users at 2.359 million, with over three-million messages sent daily. These figures are probably a tad conservative (a bit like the Mail, boom boom)

• Global visitors to Twitter rose almost fivefold to 5.57 million in September from a year earlier. Nov 12, 2008, Comscore via BBC.
• Locations (cities) with the most tweets, Tokyo is the most popular city, Real TimeTwitter Local
• Twitter is dominated by newer users - 70% of Twitter users joined in 2008, An estimated 5-10 thousand new accounts are opened per day, 35% of Twitter users have 10 or fewer followers, 9% of Twitter users follow no one at all, Dec 08, State of the Twittersphere
• (Credit: Web Strategy, Jeremiah Owyang)

Here in California, Twitter is widely embraced from public services, to schools, to theatres, to offices, to news outlets - and, of course, personally.

I believe that a public figure (such as a politician) using Twitter allows more transparency in the day-to-day workings of an individual. Would you believe something a person says, thinks or feels first-hand that they publish through Twitter, or read about it third- or fourth-hand through the traditional press?

If you’re a company promoting a concept or brand, it can help build consumer trust. Twitter can even be used at a time of crisis and can aid in disaster planning and aid response.

According to Nielsen, Twitter usage grew by 343% year-on-year and was the fastest growing social networking site of the year. It has also greatly expanded outside their youthful audience to find a place in older visitors’ professional lives.

Here in Silicon Valley, it’s practically unheard of that anyone working in web to not have a social networking presence. A great advocate of social networking, Jeremiah Owyang, (@jowyang) has close to 20,000 Twitter followers. People listen to what he says with great interest. If he suggests a ‘twitter meetup’, swarms attend - which is a great networking event and beneficial to all especially in these economic times.

To think of Twitter in its most basic terms and not think about the social networking aspects or it’s future potential is extremely short-sighted of The Mail. It’s not like they’re an active user of Twitter - oh, yeah, sorry, they are @mailonline.

I’d much rather know Will Carling (@willcarling) is trying to make his children eat veg, Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) is off to Codfish Island or Jonathan Ross (@wossy) wants Dizzee Rascal to be the new Dr Who, than the depressing rants of The Mail. I’m not saying Twitter is the b-all and end-all, but it a very useful tool nonetheless which is still in its infancy, with massive potential.

(Credit picture: Daily Mail Headlineinator)

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)

I had my first hands-on experience with the new T-Mobile G1 today and was more impressed than I thought I would be.

This little wonder is out officially tomorrow, but I got a sneak peak.

Firstly, I was really impressed with the shape and how it fits in your hand. I was not originally a fan of the bent bottom, but the way it moulds into your palm for calls is excellent. Within minutes I found the whole interface very intuitive.

The screen flips out very easily to reveal a perfectly functioning keyboard with great responsiveness. I was navigating so easily with the keyboard and buttons, I forgot about the touch-screen!

The applications are too many to mention, but even Google Maps has a nice twist to it. Run it, it’ll find your location, and with the built in e-compass as you turn the street view changes to actually reflect a 360 view. Very strange, but clever and cool.

I’m told the battery life is good, even with 3G on all day with average use. The iPhone 3G’s battery from experience isn’t too good for an average user and won’t last the day.

The camera is a powerful 3.2 megapixel one, with autofocus. Even down to a macro-level I was impressed with the quality. A neat application I saw was a bar code scanner linked to the camera. Scan a bar code in a shop, and instantly it brings up the details - and even links to Amazon to see what they’re selling it for - and buy it there and then. Clever.

The whole look-and-feel, UI and navigation has been given much thought. Again, after a short time, I was moving around the screen and applications like a pro.

I don’t think it’s a serious contender in the corporate space yet, but as soon as the applications appear similar to ActiveSync and security is proven, it’ll be a winner for sure. These will still fly off the shelf tomorrow without a doubt.

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?

I’m really interested to see the launch of Peek. A “no-nonsense” communications device. The selling point is simple - just a device for you to send and receive email. No GPS, no WiFi, no camera, no music or video player, no Bluetooth - just email.

They beat the conventional way of doing things by the major mobile providers by negating the following:

• contracts
• deposits
• rebates
• activation fees
• number porting
• complex bills and billing
• overages

It looks pretty cool too.

I’m an advocate for getting back to basics and keeping it simple. I think it could be a winning formula. What do you think?

This is the new iPhone, available July 11, enough said:

Other key takeaways:

• 35% of the Fortune 500 have participated in the iPhone 2.0 beta program. The top 5 banks, top 5 security firms, 6 or 7 top airlines, 8 of 10 top pharmaceuticals and 8 of 10 of the top entertainment companies
• Great mobile applications and games to come
• Apple will release a unified push notification service. It preserves battery life and maintains iPhone performance. It all works over the air over wifi and cellular - and it’ll be available in September
• There will be document support for all Microsoft Office files, addition of many new languages, bulk delete and move of email, ability to save files and pictures, new scientific calculator and parental controls
• Enterprise application distribution
• MobileMe, platform agnostic application suite; all applications looking like Apple native applications - looks nice. MobileMe is branded as Exchange for the rest of us - with proper ‘push’ functionality. Users of .Mac will be automatically upgraded, it will be available for $99 a year with 20GB of storage. Free trial for 60 days with iPhone 2.0
• iPhone sold 6m before running out, customer satisfaction 90%
• Need to make iPhone more affordable and allow sales in more countries
• iPhone 3G announced, black back, thinner at the edges, full plastic back, solid metal buttons, camera, flush headphone jack, improved audio
• With 3G, iPhone 36% faster than the Nokia N95 and Treo 750
• GPS included
• Full Exchange support, secure VPN
• Want to expand access to iPhones across the world, larger market, 70 countries in the next few months. iPhone will be sold for $199 for an 8GB - heavily subsidised. $299 for a white 16GB model

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 have a new look and feel for my blog. It’s more simplistic than the last, but fresh and quick to load. I’ll be refining it over the coming weeks. New items include recently posted items, funkier date format and recent comments on the right nav-bar. I still have SnapShots installed. I hope you like it.

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 just hope this is true and not the usual fluffy marketing speak. According to Fortune magazine, it seems that an Enterprise, corporate iPhone is upon us. If this is true, it will be great news for the consumer, business and, of course, Apple.

It seems that this week Apple may be about to announce their new Apple iPhone SDK, just up the road from me at their headquarters in Cupertino. Is this event going to lead into a subsequent announcement with Apple unveiling their customised Enterprise email solution?

There have been rumours that Apple have licensed Microsoft ActiveSync, or they’ve got into bed with Blackberry, with their Blackberry Connect offering - but I still think Apple will go their own way.

Analysts are saying there are four likely scenarios at the moment:

• from internal development (most likely),
• third-parties including MSFT (next likely) with its ActiveSync technology,
• or RIMM Blackberry Connect (possible but less likely)
• or a combination of two or more.

I like my iPhone, but I love my Blackberry. If I can get over the air syncing, some of the functionality of the Blackberry, and of course, Exchange corporate email on my iPhone - that’ll be it for me. Converted.

If you have a Google Hosted domain, as I do, and a Blackberry BIS account, as I do too, you’ll know how there is a little bit of an issue in setting up your hosted email within the Blackberry BIS control panel. If you add a Google hosted domain it will ask you for more information and your email server name - rather than just know what the settings are for Gmail - and most importantly of all - it doesn’t allow you to have true ‘push’ email on your Blackberry. What you actually setup is a normal POP or IMAP account that polls every 15 minutes or so and doesn’t synchronise very effectively at all.

However, today I made progress. I currently have my service with AT&T. I made a call to their support line, got passed around between three different operators - then got passed directly onto RIM after 55 minutes. (I do have a direct phone number for RIM technical support now - but I won’t share it here - what’s it worth eh?)

Once I got through, their email specialist added my domains to a recognised Gmail account list. I then recreated my email addresses within the AT&T BIS control panel, the settings were picked up for Gmail compatibility automatically - then voila - proper Gmail push email and syncronisation for my Blackberry on my hosted domains.

It was a bit of a struggle, (One hour and 19 minutes of my day) but I got there in the end. Thanks Matt at RIM technical support!