Adventures in home working

This is my first post from the iPad using the word press applications, no wysiwyg formatting unfortunately, so I’m not sure what it will look like. Anyway here goes.

The good

– the hardware is wonderful, an excellent screen, very responsive
Touch, amazing battery life, easy to clean (using a micro fibre cloth) which should have been provided!

– the apps show great promise, although they are almost all at version 1, ie functional but not feature rich. They could all do with a few extra features to iron out their niggles in use.

– the performance is excellent, I’ve not experiences any significant lag so far that wasn’t a network constraint

– PDF reading is excellent, I’m using the paid app – GoodReader – and the scanned magazines and PDF manuals and work documents that I have to read a lot are first rate provided you can manage the small text. Executive book summaries and Gartner reports are even better, as they are not quite a4. I downloaded other PDF readers but none are a patch on GoodReader. However getting a large collection of books onto the iPad proved a bit of a pain, I longed to just copy files over to the file system.

– multiple-media is wonderful, I like to consume video podcasts while cooking, washing up etc and the iPad is perfect for this. I’ve also converted a whole load of tv programmes for when I’m travelling and these are excellent too

– I’m not a huge gamer, but even I’ve been immersed in the few that I downloaded, but that’s one more distration in life that I don’t have time for very often

– the on screen keyboard is excellent for typing. I’m currently using two fingers but it’s quick and easy and responds very naturally, the autocorrect is useful as well

– evernote is an absolute dream on the iPad, better than the pc and having my whole notebook offline with me is a real boon.

– the last pass tabbed browser is a very useful app, i use last pass on the PC so it’s great to have all my passwords with me and the ability to open multiple tabs slightly mitigates the lack of multitasking

The not so good

– Im currently in a GPRS coverage area, my Blackberry and iPad are both on o2, the iPad via my mifi. However it’s very noticeable how much more tolerant the bb is to the slow network working 100% reliably. Whereas the iPad frequently times out for example. This may be an issue that I rarely face, hopefully!

– the screen definitely suffers from reflection, it’s been fairly easy to workaround this so far though. Fortunately I had a loose weave micro fibre cloth with me and this is perfect. It’s possible to clear an active screen as well without any touch event being detected

– the iPad is very very distracting. I have a Sony ebook reader as well, when I use that I read! When I pickup the iPad to read I have a dozen other things to draw my attention away and so I’m going to have to learn to be disciplined all over again. This need for discipline makes me doubly pleased that I didn’t invest in a 3G iPad, the miff was MUCH cheaper and requires that extra step to connect, hopefully that will save me from living on line and allow me to retreat into books and magazines some of the time at least

– spoilt by the Blackberry I’ve grown up with multitasking. It’s a real shock to have to go back to a serial workflow, and especially annoying to have to explicitly open applications and then wait for them to update, which ideally would have happened before I needed them in the background

– not having a filesystem visible to all applications seems a real shame, it would be great to be able to backup at filesystem level and to easily copy files to and from the pc. Every application having it’s own synching support is a real loss

– I wish I never had to use iTunes ever again, unfortunately some synching has to be done via that route and I cringe every time it’s necessary

My trustworthy Blackberry 8800 was upgraded to a Bold last week and after much anticipation I can definitely say it’s been a very worthwhile upgrade.  I’ve made these notes which might help anyone considering or receiving a bold in the near future.

Background

I’ve previously been an enthusiastic user of a Palm Treo 650, a not so enthusiastic user of various Windows Mobile Smartphones and a pretty happy user of a Blackberry 8800.  I can safely say that the Bold has the best attributes of all of these devices with few if any of the downsides.  My wife has an iPhone 3G and despite it winning over the bold in terms of sheer style and “conceptual integrity” the bold wins out for me in terms of good old fashioned performance and functionality.

The hardware

Overall the Bold seems slightly larger than the 8800, it fits fine in the 8800’s holster though and it feels great in the hand.  It’s certainly not a small device, but any smaller would be too much of a compromise for me in terms of keyboard or screen.

Screen

The screen is amazing, it’s only when you see a screen of this quality – both resolution and brightness – that you realise what a compromise you’ve been living with.  More importantly I’ve started using the bold for reading, video watching and web browsing much more than on any previous device.  Web browsing in particular is so much better, not all down to the screen of course.  I was initially surprised that RIM didn’t take the approach of cramming more information onto the screen in applications like Email and Calendar, but now I think I see their logic, the larger fonts are wonderfully crisp and I’m pleased to say that I can use the device easily without glasses, which is a luxury I haven’t had for several years.

Keyboard

Wonderful!  I was very happy with the keyboard on the 8800, but I’ve been amazed at how much better the bold is.  I have fairly small hands and this last week I’ve been suffering from Arthritis pain in them, but it’s not mattered – I’ve been tapping away faster than I thought possible.  There’s absolutely no comparison with my iPhone experience, which for me at least requires a lot of focused attention to tap out even the shortest accurate message. 

Convenience keys and trackball

I’ve found these keys to be a big differentiater compared to the iPhone.  On the iPhone I often find myself wondering whether I’ve actually pressed a soft key or whether the iPhone’s just responding slowly, pressing the home key and starting again is often required.  The physical keys on the bold are faster, more reliable and pretty consistent in terms of how applications use them, soft keys seem to give application designers perhaps too much freedom.

The trackball is the biggest area of compromise on the bold, it’s nowhere near as intuitive as the iPhone’s touch screen.  But in practice this affects only a few applications, and whilst pinch zoom demo’s well, I’ve quickly got the hang of the equally convenient shortcut keys on the bold keyboard (not always consistent across apps though).  One thing I like is that the trackball/mouse is a much more accurate way of navigating buttons and links on web pages than the finger on the iPhone.

Camera

Although the camera resolution’s not that great at 2M Pixels, it’s fine for most of my point and shoot opportunistic family snaps and wonderful for day to day photographic recording of labels, book covers, whiteboards, things I want to buy on the web when I get home from the seeing them live in the shops etc.  Although I’m missing the Camera integration with the Evernote client that the iPhone has (I love Evernote on my PCs).

Speaker

I use the speaker for listening to Podcasts and music around the house, and the Bold’s speaker is excellent, much louder and better quality than the 8800 and better than the iPhone.

Stereo A2DP Bluetooth

I have a tiny Jabra BT8040 Bluetooth headset that’s mono aural (ie fit’s in one ear) but it supports A2DP so I get good quality streamed music and more frequently Podcasts to it.  It’s working great so far and it also works with my TomTom GPS. 

Stereo Headset

I’m not a big fan of the supplied headset which seems a little too chunky for my ears, but I’m using my wife’s iPhone headset most of the time and that works fine.  At first I was annoyed that RIM changed from 2.5mm to 3.5mm, given the number of 2.5mm headsets I’d acquired over the years – but now I’m happy having realised that I now only need to carry a single headset for the bold, laptop and my car GPS.

Battery life

Seems less than the 8800 but then that’s no surprise.  I’ve not had an issue with running out of power yet.

Charger/Cradle

Before the Bold even arrived I bought a couple of the cute little charger units, one for my desk and one for my bedside table.  The external charger pickups on the Bold case mean that it’s incredibly easy to drop the bold into it’s cradle, which means I do it more often.  The really big plus though is that when charging the Bold displays a great clock – very useful.  The software also supports the concept of bedside mode, which makes for a great alarm clock, which I have configured to automatically switch off all of the radios as well as wake me up to music.

Micro SD card

I have an 8GB Micro SD card crammed full of music, Podcasts and videos.  Larger cards are supported but 8GB is cost effective.  I found inserting and removing the SD card VERY difficult, eventually resorting to tweezers.

WIFI

WIFI is a nice addition to the 3G radio, with the 3G radio off, most – but not all – applications continue to work over WIFI, and downloading software’s is much faster.

Interface and built in applications

Theme

The new theme is very nice, choosing to take a more stylised approach than the easier to identify iPhone icons, although I’m sure that an iPhone like theme will be available already for download. 

So far I’m happy with the built in Precision Silver theme, although I did quickly copy most of the applications out of folders and into the home folder.  I don’t have enough additional applications to make folders that worthwhile yet, I have kept the folders for downloads and games, although downloads that I find really useful get quickly copied to the home folder.

Applications

In the order that they appear in my home folder

Email

The new screen and the super crisp fonts make emails a joy to read (well some of them anyway) and various other minor tweaks make the whole reading experience simpler.

Calendar

A bit of a disappointment, I was hoping for a better week view that would take advantage of the new screen solution (third party products will fill the gap) but it’s fast and functional and makes good use of keyboard shortcuts for jumping around and switching views.

Browser

The improvement in the browser is great, making it so much more usable than the 8800 was, of course the WIFI/3G helps.  It’s not quite in the same league as the iPhone browser which feels almost desktop like, but for me the Bold’s browser does the job I want it to, its fast, following links and clicking on buttons is very precise with the trackball, it seems pretty compatible with everything I’ve used it for, zooming is fairly quick and easy. 

On my desktop and laptop I rely totally on Roboform for password management, which means the only password I know is my master password.  This is a major issue for password protected web sites and I’m looking forward to a solution for automatically entering passwords into web pages.  Roboform has a Blackberry app available, but it doesn’t support auto password entry yet.

Twitterberry

I’m a massive fan of twitter – my web command line, and main social networking/communications tool.  Twitter was the first application I installed and it really takes advantage of the Bold’s screen.  The latest version of Twitterberry is great as well.

Google search

Being one click away from a Google search is just so convenient, so it’s right up there in terms of my most used applications

Sametime Connect – Instant messaging

CSC (my employer) uses Sametime for instant messaging and presence and it works superbly on the Blackberry, it’s not noticeably better on the bold.  CSC push installs Sametime into the downloads folder, I copied it to my home folder straight away.

Media Player

I reprogrammed the left hand side convenience key to start the media player, which I mainly use for Podcasts, video and music.  The media player is pretty good, massively improved for video and now seems to support the videos targeted at iPods, the video quality is excellent.  Playing Podcasts is reasonable, it doesn’t bookmark, but the media player keeps your place so long as your don’t reboot the device. 

If you browse for Podcasts in the file system you get the option to play a single file, a folder or all the files in a folder and the file browser allows you to delete Podcasts and videos that you have listened to which is very useful.

Audio quality is good, but lots of Podcasts don’t have the gain very high – ie they are quiet even at max volume, removing the safety limit on max volume helps here.

I copy media files straight from the PC to the Bold, no Blackberry Desktop Manager required.

Camera

The Camera is ok, as described above, it’s made a big difference to me and it’s made even more useful with the Flickr uploader application and through the integration with Twitter via Twitpic support in Twitterberry (lets you upload a photo and publish a link via Twitter) which is good fun.

Contacts

No real changes that I noticed, although by installing Taskify, it’s now really easy to turn an email into a task which is very useful as I do a lot of email processing on my Blackberry and also send a lot of tasks to myself as emails.

GPSed

A great application for saving GPS tracks for later sharing or personal use.  They can be uploaded to a website and linked to photo’s taken to illustrate the route.  I used this a lot on the 8800, not yet used it in anger on the Bold, but looking forward to it given the Bold’s Camera.

Google maps

Just keeps getting better and better!  Ultra useful application, I especially love the ability to search for – say – nearby Cafes and then get instructions for how to get to them from my current location, and the awesome satellite view, which has saved me from getting lost many times.

Fastforward

Autoforwards by mobile number to my home office phone whenever I plugin the USB, which I almost always do at home. 

gMail

Access to my personal gMail account

YahooMail

Access to my personal yahoo email account

Flickr uploader

Auto upload photo’s to Flickr, these photo’s can be linked to routes uploaded using GPSed

Profiles

Discovered that “press and hold” Q will switch the phone into Quiet mode, press and hold again switches back to Normal, very handy.  I also like the bedside mode.

Clock/Alarm clock

I know it’s sad but the auto display of a really nice clock, alarm clock or countdown timer when I pop the phone into it charging cradle is a small but very useful feature.

Remember the Milk

Integrates my RTM account with Blackberry Tasks, Twitter integration and Email integration is also good with RTM, so I have lots of ways to get tasks to the Blackberry and then back into Lotus Notes.

Documents to go

A massive improvement over the 8800 and I particularly like the Text only view which is easy to read and fast to navigate.  No support for viewing ink annotations though.

Out of the box I had a few issues with my Thinkpad X60T running Vista:

1. After a morning working by the beach the wireless network was often disabled when I plugged in at home,  I needed to do a “Diagnose and repair” to re-enable it
2. After a not so useful windows update I found that my display was often switched off when I resumed from sleep,  I had to cycle through sleep again to get it back
3. Active rotate has never worked reliably and now doesn’t work at all

The first two of these are now solved – or at least I have a workaround

1. For wireless, go into the advanced power settings and configure it so that the wireless adapter isn’t powered down.  What seems to have been happening is that if available battery power dipped below some value the wireless adapter was disabled.  Now if I want to save power I use the mechanical switch to disable wireless, but I hardly ever need to
2. For blank screen, I found out that provided I suspend BEFORE I close the lid, when I resume the screen is always on.  Slightly annoying but much better than before.
3. Fix to get Active Rotate working reliably anyone??

I’m always loosing my Blackberry, but fortunately I always manage to find it, normally by ringing it up.  But I always worry that I will leave it on silent or it will be too far away to find by ear.  Anyway there’s a solution it’s called berry locator, check it out: http://www.mobireport.com/apps/bl/ 

definitely seems to be worth $4.95.  You can download the trial here

http://mobireport.com/bl/demo.jad

I tried it and it works great.

While I was at my in-laws this weekend I didn’t have broadband so I installed OnSpeed to improve performance of my GPRS connection.  I have been pretty impressed, here are the main advantages:

1. For me OnSpeed seems to compress data by an average of 3-4 times, of course OnSpeed claims more!
2. This means on my capped Orange GPRS/3G data connection I can now stay online all the time that I am out of the house and browse quite a bit and not really worry about hitting my cap
3. It also means that browsing is significantly faster
4. It seems to have a much better estimate of GPRS data usage than my 3G Watcher program
5. It’s transparent in use

What’s the catch:

1. It costs £24.99/year which I think is a good deal when you consider how much GPRS per MB data costs are
2. Images are compressed, the quality is slightly reduced, but its not been an issue for me so far
3. You can block adverts if you want more compression, which I personally think is a good thing, although the Maxthon ad blocker is better
4. It seems to slow browsing down slightly when I’m on my fast ADSL connection,  you can disable it, but its not significant enough for me to bother disabling it