jr conlin's ink stained banana

One of the things i got when moving to the new job was a blackberry.

It's an 8830 Curve international version to be specific, which means no camera and it can take whatever SIM i can populate it with, should i be somewhere what doesn't speak USAian cellphoney speak. i didn't ask for it, of course, and it's probably not going to replace my normal phone (mostly because i've had the same cell number for more than a decade, and i'm not about to abandon it thankyouverymuch.)

So, i kinda view this the way that i view renting a car when i'm traveling. It's a chance for me to kick the tires and try out something different. This was particularly interesting in view of my previous thoughts regarding such things.

In summary, after about a week, i can now understand why the iPhone is so damn popular.

First the good (because there is some)

• it's light and thin, definitely "pocketable"
• It (sort of) has a usb2 port for (sort of) charging
• It has expandable(ish) memory
• It's reasonably easy to read and the battery lasts a few days.
• i can get company email on it.

So, why the hedging? Well, that's easy. While there is a USB2 mini b port and it allows me to connect it to a laptop, said laptop needs to be running "Blackberry USB drivers" which apparently send something other than the standard 7/5 voltage to the device. Ok, plugging in the beast still charges, but the phone complains that the voltage isn't tasty enough and that it needs more lemony fresh goodness. i call BS on that, naturally. (Plus, there was the fact that Blackberry's Desktop Manager 4.5 causes all kinds of havoc on Vista, including deactivating it, messing with the sleep driver stack, and more than enough other reasons for me to remove it from my laptop and hope i wouldn't have to reinstall Vista. Removing said package also cured my problems, so yes, that was absolutely the reason.)

The other annoying bit is that unlike every other modern miniSD provider, the slot on this is more a latch-gate affair. Oh yeah, and you have to slide the back off in order to get to it. Not a deal breaker by any stretch, but one thinks that with all the various slots and holes the thing has already, one of them could have been for a springloaded microSD.

Now, for the bad:

• The browser sucks.
  Hard.
  It doesn't get CSS, javascript, or really anything. It's about two steps up from running lynx. As an added bonus, the Perl loves the little ball thing to navigate around. One can only think that perhaps this was designed by a young lady who desired gentlemen to learn a particular amorous talent. Yes, i know that hitting space bar is effectively a page down operation, but that's not really made clear in any fashion. What's worse is that i can't even load Opera onto the beast, since (for whatever reason) i can't click on the "accept" button for the terms of use.
• The battery life is "ok". i get about two and a half days out of a charge.
• Locking and unlocking the phone is the least intuitive thing ever. Instead of "Press and hold X to lock/unlock" you've got to manually pick "lock" from the menu to lock it and hit "* + green phone thingy" to unlock. There also doesn't seem to be a way to autolock the device which means that i have to remember to lock it before i slip it into my pocket.
• i'm also a little disappointed that the bluetooth capabilities really aren't as good as i'd imagined. i can't access my addressbook from the Garmin (Oh, more reasons to love the 660, it can handle being attached to multiple phones), nor can i pull up messages off of it.

All-in-all, the blackberry is a functional device, nothing more. It offers the same level of service as a Dodge Neon, without the glamor and good looks. When Helio is finally absorbed into the corpus Virgin and the levels of suck reach critical, i'll not be replacing my Ocean with a Blackberry.

Sadly, it looks like Apple will win that round. (egh, i feel dirty now.)

At least until someone can come up with something better.