My wife is required to own a smartphone (which the residency program will pay for), gets a 22% discount at Verizon stores, and was able to get released from her current T-Mobile contract because they do not have coverage in Williamsport. She decided on the BlackBerry Curve 8330, and we went to purchase one and sign a Verizon contract this evening. I intended to join her contract to take advantage of the discount and opt-out of the AT&T plan that I have shared with my family for the past 6 years, getting whatever inexpensive (or preferably free) handset that they would give me.
When the salesman informed me that we could get a second BlackBerry for free with the purchase, and that with our discount a data plan would only cost $23 per month, I caved in. A phenomenon that I feared has already begun: while we were able to live on my meager salary for years, now that Rachel is getting a paycheck it is much easier to spend that extra money on things that would have seemed extravagant last year than to put it all into debt relief.
The ability to send and receive email from virtually anywhere will be remarkably nice, and it appears I should be able to get an SSH client, with which I should be able to monitor experiments, write code, and otherwise work on the go. It is time, I suppose, for me to take up this additional totem of geekery. However, I have so far found the interface to be clunky, the connection slow, and the screen real estate small enough to make doing much of anything tedious. Hopefully with time and experience I will no longer notice these limitations. In the meantime, do you know of any cool/useful things I can do with the BlackBerry? Tethering would have been nice, but requires an additional fee. There is an application store, but it seems to be not nearly as extensive as what the iPhone purportedly has or that I expect Android-based phones to eventually have.
I’ve been curious about the BlackBerry platform, since Palm OS will probably be dead by the time I need a new handset. Laura has one (in addition to her Palm handset. The BB is owned by her work). I just can’t get over the fact that pressing the hangup button doesn’t turn off the screen and lock the phone instantly. That stupid “butt call” commercial (for BlackBerry flip-phones) would make no sense if they take this one page from Palm. The apps seem OK, but I’ve never tried to download one from the web, on the phone. Just tell me the one you got isn’t one with the two-letters-per-key keyboard.
Comment by Kriebel — June 28, 2009 @ 2:53 am
An automatic screen-lock would be nice, but one of the “apps” does just that, and I placed it on the row of five default icons. No two-letters-per-key, but I have not yet gotten used to using a qwerty keyboard with my thumbs — I keep expecting letters to be in alphabetical order like on a normal telephone.
Comment by chadhogg — June 28, 2009 @ 12:40 pm
I’ve heard that if you gone with the storm rather than the curve you might have had a better experience. I’ve messed with the BB pearl and was entirely unimpressed for pretty much the same reasons you were. I think the storm alleviates most of that to a certain degree but I’ve never used one myself.
Comment by Mykroft — June 29, 2009 @ 12:00 pm
OK, fwiw, there’s software that can run a SOCKS proxy on the phone available to a Bluetooth PAN. This is actually a better way to share networking than doing PPP into a Bluetooth serial port (insert retching sounds about 90s tech). You may have to find some kind of cracked version of the software, and it’s not likely to be detected by the phone company’s “oh nohs, you need to pay more for tethering” software. Oh, and since it’s just SOCKS, it only works with TCP, it’s not NAT, it’s slow… yadda yadda.
Also, exiting what you’re doing to lock the screen isn’t good enough. The Palm goes to sleep leaving what you were doing right the way you left if (this was the Palm paradigm since the beginning). Since none of the phones (except maybe the Pre) truly multitask, having to go back to the menu clobbers your workflow.
Comment by Kriebel — June 29, 2009 @ 8:16 pm
[...] have very recently become a Verizon customer through the account my wife started for her work. (See Taking The Smartphone Plunge.) I would like to use the same telephone number that I have had for years on an AT&T family [...]
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