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.

1. Citrix predict that between 30 and 50% of people will be mobile by 2010
2. Some form of rights management is required when delivering to unmanaged PCs.  For example XenApp has a type of rights management, ie it can disable cut and paste, save to local PC disk, Print etc based on the results of a NAC check.  Microsoft have a much richer rights management solution, but its not currently integrated with NAC, nor can it be applied to all applications.  My thought perhaps SoftGrid execution environment could be NAC and rights management enabled, and therefore prevent certain things on unmanaged PCs
3. 10% of people poled in a couple of sessions had increasing IT budgets
4. 60% of people are expected to be working either from home or in branch offices by 2010
5. There were 1.2B mobile phones in 2007, expected to be 1B SmartPhones by 2010
6. 47% of companies now consider data protection now more important than perimeter security, again another hint at the potential growth of rights management if it could be made seamless enough for people who have rights!
7. An IDC study was quoted that predicted that knowledge workers would be working with 60% of their information sourced from outside the company within 5 years.  I can really relate to this, I think I’m way beyond that ratio already and this >60% is part of my personal knowledge management system, not my companies, although some small part of it is relevant to share.

1. A laptop
2. A physical desktop
3. A client side virtual machine, copied or streamed to the PC
4. A web application portal
5. A server hosted desktop

Whilst I can see use cases where all of the above are great solutions, it’s not immediately obvious how the decision making process should work in the enterprise.  To start off here’s a short discussion of the  alternatives:

1. A laptop’s a great solution for someone who doesn’t want to work a fixed work locations, but rather wants the flexibility to work shoulder to shoulder with a colleague, work in conference rooms, hotels, the back garden etc.  Clearly it’s also the only solution for people working with unreliable or no network connection.  I see this workstyle being pretty standard for many knowledge workers going forward.
2. A physical desktop seems most at threat from VDI, it doesn’t offer any particularly compelling attributes, until you start to think about the future of the desktop.  Practically unlimited encrypted storage, low power consumption, support for operating system streaming or iSCSI boot, massive computational capacity.  If someone could figure out how to drive real productivity improvements by using all that storage and processing power then we might easily see the desktop swing back into favour.  Even if the desktop PC continues to be used pretty much as it is today It’s not unreasonable to consider the desktop as essentially a VDI client, streaming OS, Apps and Environment on demand in a very VDI like way but just without all of that server and storage infrastructure.
3. I’ve used client side virtual PCs for years, but I wouldn’t want to do all my work on one.  My gut feel is that this will change by 2009 when we will see client side hypervisors readily available and these hosting one or more personal VMs and an enterprise VM thats either streamed to the client, along with streamed apps and environment or just managed as if it were a physical PC, just easier to fix.
4. A web application portal is my favourite way to get at all the “enterprise” applications that I use.  I have no desire to go back to using an enterprise desktop.  Just give me my personal laptop and Internet access and I’m away.  CSC provides me with a portal that fronts expenses, procurement, email, collaborative services etc, and I get a backup solution for my PC that provides an Internet accessible web site for me to access/recover all my documents in the event of a hardware failure or loss/theft of my laptop.
5. A server hosted desktop, most often XenApp provides a locked down environment that meets the needs of many users, and at a price point that VDI can’t reach.  Of course for enterprises that just want to publish applications, it provides a great solution for that too.

Ok after rambling through the alternatives I think I’m ready with my list of key questions:

1. Do you need a solution that costs less than the money you will save by replacing desktop PCs?  If yes then it’s unlikely that VDI is for you unless the desktop PCs are particularly difficult to support, like those in remote branch offices or home locations.  The marginal saving of removing a PC is pretty low when automated tools are used for management.
2. Do your users really want a desktop?  Lots of users who are using a PC as their client device don’t want another desktop, they just want the applications published to them and integrated into their desktop experience.  Microsoft recently ran a trial of their Server 2008 product which offers secure Internet access to applications with “seamless windows” and a full published desktop.  Most users just wanted to use seamless applications.  As I explained above in CSC we just publish web applications.  As consumerization takes hold expect lots of users to prefer to use their own PC for access and look to the enterprise just for the apps they need.  Of course publishing a full desktop costs more, but it does offer a more secure environment and a more controlled end to end user experience.
3. Do you really want windows applications?, if your users needs are simple – and many people looking at VDI keep saying all my users need is email and Office – then perhaps all they really need is a good web email and a well integrated web office suite, and that’s way cheaper than any virtual desktop solution.
4. Do you already have a well managed desktop environment in place?  if you do it’s fairly easy to just deploy a VDI environment to essentially just “provision virtual machines” from that point onwards you might well find it’s cheaper to manage them like every other PC on your network.  You can’t do this with XenApp so unless you already have a well managed XenApp environment in place you will probably find that XenApps infrastructure cost advantage is written off by increased OS and Application management costs.
5. Do your users need to personalise their desktop?  lots of people seem to think that users want VDI because they want to “personalise” their desktop.  Well by personalise most people mean installing applications and many enterprises frown on that.  It might be better to provide two environments,  one that’s locked down and includes enterprise applications and another that’s essentially personal.   This is expensive if you use VDI to provide both of these, or use VDI for one and XenApp for the other, but its not too bad if you provide your users with an allowance to go buy their own laptop and then provide them with VDI, a client side VM, XenApp or a web portal.
6. What are your availability needs? An office full of desktops and laptops can offer a very high level of aggregate availability (for example 95% of an offices PCs might reasonably be available 99.999% of the time) but a VDI or Server hosted desktop environment won’t deliver this level of availability to the desk without a lot of investment.  Not many people need this level of availability, but if you do it’s an important consideration.
7. When does VDI make sense?  Even if VDI isn’t the right solution today, its going to get cheaper – of course PC’s are going to get cheaper – or at least use less power – and more secure and easier to manage as well.

Ok so I’ve rambled on a bit more,  if you answered the questions above and still want VDI it’s likely that you have a lot of expensive desktop PCs to replace and/or you want to increase security, flexibility and agility and you want to do it now.

Time for me to offer up what I thinks going to happen:

1. A lot more laptops,  I think perhaps 30-50% in many enterprises
2. Initially a lot of edge cases where VDI makes really good sense, you might say “the places that traditional desktops and laptops find hard to reach”
3. Some enterprises that have very large desktop user populations today, who don’t have a rich mobility requirement, but do have a large and complex legacy application portfolio will be tempted to move to VDI now
4. Users who do get VDI will get a smartphone as well, or at least get access to email, presence, IM etc on their own smartphones.  perhaps the smartphone will have a bunch of virtualized client applications on its USB drive that can be accessed from any PC, including the VDI client software
5. Within a year VDI costs will have fallen a bit, but not enough.  Desktop PC TCO will have fallen as well and security and manageability will have increased making VDI more expensive again, but with fewer advantages.
6. The app streaming, environment streaming and OS streaming infrastructure that represents the most sophisticated VDI implementations today, will support desktop PCs and ultimately portables as well.  At this point client device choice matters a lot less, and of course it’s then not either or.  It’s simply a matter of right device, anytime, any place.  if I’m a laptop user but I need to quickly access a large file I can run up a VDI environment on demand, laptop gets stolen no problem, just spin up a VDI session for a week and then stream everything back to my new laptop when it arrives.

Anyway the point of this post is to point out this very interesting article about a concept that Apple has for making the iPhone even more of a lifecycle companion.  It’s only a small step towards the companion described in Hominids, but its a good early indicator.  One can only admire Apples Strategy and Execution and this article makes a good case for why they will be very difficult to beat in the rich mobile experience space.

My conclusion is that it’s definitely going to be personal use cases that dominate the selection criteria for mobile devices for the majority pretty soon and that enterprise integration is just going to be a nice to have feature.  That’s not the case yet for me, because the Blackberry still provides such a superior Mobile Lotus Notes experience, but it won’t be long (hopefully) before this evolves to a similar plug and play experience (ie most Smart Phones are enterprise as standard and just need to plug into the appropriate enterprise service) that Microsoft ActiveSync provides.

I’ve seem a whole load of business cases for mobile devices that rest on efficiency improvements that are only achieved by displacing real-time collaboration, thinking time and relaxation.

So I was very pleased to see HP take the initiative and set up a collaboration with The Chief Happiness Officer under the banner Business runs better on happiness.  HP have taken a few useful first steps:

Our happiness experiment had two parts. First, we surveyed 800 workers, from companies with up to 100 employees, to find out what would make them happy. They might be shy of telling their boss, but they didn’t pull any punches with us. Second, we subjected volunteers to an experiment that tested people’s responses to different working environments

and they have provided the research online:

» Read about our experiment and its results

» Find out more about our research

» Read the Happy People press release

I have read a little on the results of their research, and to be honest it doesn’t surprise me, although I also don’t think it’s that reliable as the subjects probably responded as much to the attention they were receiving and the novelty as they did to the changes.  However in my personal experience I have seen significant improvements from simillar changes, here’s a snip:

The same workers, given the freedom, tools and trust to work in a more ‘free-range’ style, experienced a dramatic improvement in their mental wellbeing. The results were startling:

• Productivity shot up by 400 percent
• Stress levels fell by more than 50 percent
• IQ scores increased by an average of 28 percent
• Blood pressure was lower
• Short term memory improved. Volunteers retained 33 percent more information

Alexander also announces the news on his blog.  In particular I liked this offer:

As part of its ongoing ‘Happy People’ marketing campaign, HP will be providing free consultancy to UK businesses on how to improve ‘happiness’ within the office through the use of HP mobility technology.

1. Listen to music or Podcasts, with automatic bookmarking so I don’t loose my place.  While listening I want to be able to interrupt my flow and without touching my phone (but I don’t mind pressing a button on my headset) I want to be able to:
1. Answer calls and pause my music
2. Make calls using voice recognition and pause my music
3. Listen to GPS instructions and pause my music
4. Take a voice note and pause my music
2. While on a call I want to be able to:
1. Be heard on a windy day or when there’s other background noise
2. Mute and un-mute that call without touching the phone, but again I don’t mind pressing a button on my headset
3. Record a segment of the call
4. Conference someone else into the call
3. While writing an email I want to be able to:
1. Record a voice note and email that instead of writing on the tiny keyboard

This article also provides some interesting future scenarios for audio, concentrating on the hardware and sharing of audio.  This article links to it and has a good comment thread.

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