Notes from a BlackBerry Newby

Weekly Highlights – 22 Nov 2009 through 28 Nov 2009

pelegri — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 22:03:09 +0000

Highlights and Analysis for Weekly News

• Google’s new BES connector – What’s strategic moves does that enable?
• Several new BB apps (eBay, NYTimes, Bing…) – Good, but none is a super-killer app (yet?)
• Adobe is a great partner – technical/business-wise!
• Mastercard Deal? – Payments is a natural for BBs
• China BB deal – but 3rd place carrier
• More non-exclusive iPhones deals – more growth there
• BB Getting ready for Themes? – great oppty
• Role of HTML5 in future evolution of Mobile Web? What’s Adobe’s angle?
• Official BB sites improved, but still not up to Apple’s standard.
• Google removes API access to YouTube
• Google Maps Navigation on more Androids – but not yet on BBerries.
• Web pundits still in love with Android

HowTo – Turn Radio Back On?

pelegri — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 23:33:50 +0000

Problem

BlackBerry’s battery was very low and the device turned off the radio. The radio stayed turned off even after I started recharging the battery. How to turn the radio back on?

Answer

Go to the main Options Panel
Under Mobile Network, set Data Services to On.

HowTo – Merge SMS and Emails?

pelegri — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 21:58:18 +0000

Problem

My SMSs were not showing on my Messages queue, why? And what changed?

Answer

Go to the Messages app.
Check on Options.
Under “SMS and Email Inboxes“, select “combined“

More Details

The reason why SMS and Email was showing in separate Apps / Queues is because that option had been set previously to “theme controlled“, and I had just installed a new Theme that requested that action

(Fake) Steve Jobs on BlackBerries…

pelegri — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 04:02:09 +0000

Nice to see that Fake Steve Jobs recognizes the market share by BlackBerry. It’s a bit annoying how little the BlackBerry is covered by Gizmodo and Engadget – and even BoyGeniusReport. RIM has an outreach/education challenge to meet.
Recent entries:

Droid Launch Week

pelegri — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:45:15 +0000

The Attack of the Droids and Androids

Yesterday (Friday) I went by a local Verizon store to check out the Storm 2 and the Moto Droid. More on the Storm 2 elsewhere. The Droid was much less impressive in person than on paper. I went predisposed to like it but didn’t. It felt heavy and clunky, the tactice experience was much inferior to the iPod and the BlackBerries. The keyboard was cheesy and the joystick seemed useless; I like the keyboard on my Tour and the keyboard on the Droid felt much inferior.

I was surprised the store looked very empty. And only a couple of people were looking at the Droids. It would be very interesting if the Droid was not a big success, given the big push from Verizon and Goodle.

A recap of the news the week the Verizon Droid launched.

Creating a new term: “App Phone” (David Pogue @ NYT)
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Announced: Sony’s First Android Device
Star Wars revisited – Darth Droid’s Terror Is Insignificant Against The Power Of The Fanboy
DROID headed to Germany as Motorola MILESTONE (update: Italy too, no Google Maps Navigation) – That’s interesting, no gMaps Nav but Moto NAV instead.
Sprint launches Samsung Moment, Android empire expands by one – Samsung’s Android at Sprint.
HTC Droid Eris @BGR
Droid Reviews: Motorola DROID review @ BGR – Android 2.0 Review: Almost Human @ Gz. - Moto Droid @ Gz.
BGR – Another Verizon DROID commercial, Stealth, and it’s awesome - Argh! we review Ads!
GSM Motorola Droid (aka Milestone) Gets Multi-Touch Support!? – But not in the US? Patents?
Want a Droid for Work E-mail? It’ll Cost You Extra
Upgrades and Downgrades. Palm is downgraded.
Patent issues on multi-touch and Android 2.0
Verizon Droid Launch Reviews @PCWorld.

Five Minutes on a Storm 2

pelegri — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:21:46 +0000

I spent a few minutes on a Storm 2 at a Verizon store yesterday (Friday, after the big Droid launch) and it seemed quite nice. A pity the timing on the whole Verizon/Droid, but I’ll be interested to see how the market reacts – the Verizon store didn’t have much traffic.

Added – I went back on Saturday and about the same level of traffic. The BOS 5.0 browser feels significantly better than on my 4.x Tour. Nowhere as fast as the iPhone’s one.

The Storm2 UI seemed reasonable overall. It changed from portrait to landscape quite fast, and flick-scrolling was good. The one thing I really don’t like is the resistive typing. I really appreciate longer-stroke keyboards like the Thinkpads over the new brand of short-stroke keyboards (that’s the main reason I’ve not bought one of the new Apple compact keyboards) but it seems to me thumbing and finger-keyboarding are different. And virtual keyboards are different to physical ones. It may be that it is an issue of fine-tuning the amount of resistance. Or it may be intrinsic

Since the storm uses a capacitive screen not a resistive screen (how stuff works) and the haptic feedback comes from a separate piece, it would be interesting if one could turn these off and see how it feels.

Plenty of other reviews along these lines, see for example Andrew Nusca @ ZDNet. Since I don’t have the memories of the first Storm, I’m more positive than Larry Digman: It’s not enough to erase the memories of the first.

I try the (BOS5) browser the next time I’m at a store. (done)

Push Matters… Do People Know?

pelegri — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:59:34 +0000

Consumers, industry bandits, press (analysts too?) don’t seem to get the value of push… Here are some ideas to help people “get push”. Some ideas:

A packet counter App that shows what each App in my BB was responsible for?? So I can tell, for example, that my twitter App is using up my battery?
A way to see if a given App was push enabled?
A counter for push packages in an App?
Simple explanations of push architectures for Gizmodo / Engadget / Boy Genius Report
An assessment of the bandwidth saved in realistic scenarios by using push. Maybe at the carrier level? (See the ZFS dedup numbers running around this last week).

Deployed Push is one of the key competitive advantages that RIM has. It needs to jump on it now… the alternative is to wait for Apple to deploy push and then convince everybody that they need it… But that won’t help RIM.

A different point is how to help software vendors write push apps, both on the client and the server side. I think there are several options there too…

BB Killer Apps – Focus on HTTP NOT the browser!

pelegri — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 17:22:45 +0000

The browsers changed our lifes – from Mosaic to Netscape to Explorer to Firefox and Safari. But the real change was, and is, HTTP. For a while it was easy to confuse the two, but that is clear now – the bulk of the growth is NOT really about the browser!

Sure, a good browser is a must, but consider these key applications:

Facebook
Twitter
YouTube
Alerts/News
ITunes

All of these are easily accessed through a browser on the desktop/ laptop but they do not rely on a browser. See for instance all the variations on the layout that FB has been attempting. Or all the different tweeter clients.

Browser integration is critical on the laptop because people live inside it (for multiple reasons, including, I believe, the size of the screen and the multi-tasking approach!). But thr flow of activity is different in the mobile: one needs to switch focus anyhow to go to a new task. And, if you are going to switch, you can easily move from the browser to something else. A browser is a good lowest common denominator access but it is NOT the most effective mechanism.

Case in point: I’m creating the draft for this blog on my BB using the WordPress BB App; but I use a browser on the laptop (confession- the WordPress app on my BB did not let tune-up a couple of things, so I am now doing a pass at my laptop before publishing the entry).

Back to killer Apps. Facebook, Blogs, Tweeter are all http-based, all keyboard-intensive and can make-do with a narrow window. Add fast delivery of information. And day-long use. And you get that push on a BB is a good fit. Focus on facilitating these types of applications – for example, news, but not through the browser (see What is the Role for BB’s Web Signals?)

YouTubes (and Maps) are a bit harder. For those you need a larger screen. The storm2 had the right size but the market is still deciding on that SureType thingy.

BB AppWorld and iPhone App Store

pelegri — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:57:19 +0000

Just started spending a bit more time on the BB AppWorld.

At first approximation, the AppWorld is like the iPhone App Store. And, from that perspective, I’d very much like to be able to use it to find out what I have on my BB. It is quite confusing / distracting / cumbersome that the AppWorld tells me that I’ve archived Slacker 2.0.2, when I have installed Slacker 2.0.49.

It is very nice that RIM/BB does not force me to use the RIM AppWorld, but the AppWorld client should show me everything that’s in my device, not just what I installed via the RIM store. The beauty of the BB infrastructure is that it knows that… but I don’t want to go to Options->Advanced->Applications and do a visual diff/aggregate.

And, while fixing that, I’d like to know what version of the AppWorld client I’m running from the application. Pretty please!

Keep the good work…

What is the Role for BB’s Web Signals?

pelegri — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 17:36:09 +0000

Just bumped into the BB web signal at the BB site. Where are they supposed to fit in the BB ecosystem? And why are they not in the AppWorld?

Are they an evolutionary dead-end? A brand-new development?

They seem to me they could be a handy, quick, way for content providers to push information to the BB users via BB push. The content is all relatively homogeneous and one could write a pretty nice generic WebSignal client that everybody could reuse to generate content (via RSS/Atom). Then everybody reuses the same machinery and benefits from updates to the common client.

Right now (as tested by the CBC News and from the docs I can see), this is an icon that then launches the browser. Which is emphasizing the weakest part of the BB platform!