Ramblings From Justin Penney

I thought I was over smartphones when I bought the Sony-Erricson TM-506 ... well I was wrong.

The Sony was/is a great phone; by far is was the most quality feeling phone that I've owned. The software was mostly good (there were a few annoyances) but the hardware felt great. The screen and camera were really good also, definitely better than any phone that I've owned.

I missed the keyboard. Even the Blast's two-per-key pseudo qwerty keyboard was better than working with a standard numeric keypad.

Jacey was also looking for a new phone. She had been using the Sidekick ID for a while but due to its size, she never had it with her. I constantly harassed her for never answering her phone. She had decided on a Blackberry Pearl.

Another bit of confluence, Ryan and Tiffany got Blackberry Curves. Ryan, somewhat a luddite (and I mean that in a nice way), really like the Blackberry. I place a great deal of emphasis on the human interface of gadgets and a positive review from Ryan probably means that there is a reasonable interface.

I intended to by a Curve but Jacey and I ended up with Pearls.

I was happy with how straightforward it was to set up the email and calendar syncing with the Google Apps. I am also pleased that SMS, Email and Pin messages are accessible in one list. There are a lot of options, especially with the profiles, but that kind of flexibility is nice to have. Thankfully, the defaults aren't terrible.

Like always, I have some annoyances to air. Instant messages should be better integrated as normal messages. I have also not been able to log in with AIM and Yahoo. Sometimes it seems to just randomly slow down. When it gets slow, I go through the switch applications dialog and kill everything. This seems to work. I also had a problem with my contacts as I chose to sync them with the Google Apps address book. I had imported contacts from my SIM and during the sync things got pretty wonky and it took around an hour for me to re-enter/edit the ones that needed fixed.

The two-letters-per-key arrangement is much improved over the implementation on the Samsung Blast. The Blast seemed to always default to the most improbable word in it's dictionary, the Blackberry is the exact opposite.

# posted by Justin @ 10:10 PM