philly

After having my Blackberry Curve 8330 for Verizon Wireless for a few months, I've come to like it quite a bit. I posted some initial thoughts after a few weeks with the device and here go some more thoughts after several months worth of use…

While this badboy is far from perfect, it's boosted my productivity a ton. This phone makes me money. How so? I'm in contact far more easily than I was previously. I'm reading emails from all my inboxes in a nice global inbox on my phone now – email integration on the Motorola Q (my previous phone) was a pain and I never used it as a result. I'm getting emails about photo gigs while on one job and can reply with a quick yes or no to the client and not leave them hanging for half a day or more. I know for a fact that my clients appreciate this and that makes for happy clients who are even more willing to pass my name along to their network of friends and associates. The keyboard is still a dream to use. I don't know how people use touchscreen keyboards – they annoy the shit out of me. While I've had my share of battery pulls (a hard reset), they don't happen very often. Usually, a quick power off then on will solve some small hangup which happens every few weeks. On to the apps…

First some thoughts on apps I mentioned in my previous post which I no longer use or use less often: Opera Mini – it just doesn't cut it for me anymore. All the sites I frequent render quite well in the BB Browser and haven't had a need for the Opera browser for several months. The flickr app is so iffy it drives me nuts. It'll tell me I'm not logged in when I've just logged in. It'll cut off transmitting photos. It'll tell me photos haven't transmitted when they actually have. I've resorted to using email to post to flickr on the road which is a bit of a pain since it won't automatically send photos to my mobile set and I have to remember which field corresponds to title, tag, description. I haven't used Tellme as it's much easier to type in what I'm looking for. I don't drive much so I have no need for a handsfree thing to look things up. I just don't get around to using my Viigo nowadays. It works well, but I prefer reading through my RSS feeds on a computer.

It seems that qik has finally solved their BB 8330 issues and uploading videos is no longer an issue. I've only used this function a couple of times, but it's pretty damn cool. It'll be cool to use this function in an on-the-scene manner at some point.

Whrrl is a clunky tell your friends where you're drinking/eating + review app all in one. It's pretty slow to load pages and reviews and that's kept me away from it. Also, I don't go out to drink too much and I don't know anyone else who is using the service which doesn't help things.
UPDATE 3.18.09
Whrrl has relaunched to 2.0 as some kind of SMS enabled storytelling service, tied in with facebook (my enemy) and twitter, which I think is weird and ungainly without giving it a try. It is not supported by the VZW network as of right now.

Poynt does what Windows Live Search does, but in a more sleek GUI. Unfortunately, it doesn't work as well. Or it just plain doesn't work. Oh well.

Xpenser isn't a BB-specific application, nor is it technically an application, but I use it all the time. It's a service you can use via email or txt to keep track of the things you spend money on. If you use it via txt, it'll ping back to you confirming receipt of your latest expense. If yo use it via email (how I use it), you'll have the message in your sent messages folder in case it doesn't show up online for some reason and you can always resend it. What you do is enter 3 'fields' in an email subject line. The first field will be the category, the second the amount and the third notes. So, if you've just spent $5 at NYPD Pizza for lunch, you could write: "Food 5 NYPD Pizza". This helps me immensely. What this really is though, is for people to keep track of more business-like expenses. You can generate expense reports straight from the site online. You can delve further into geeky reporting by assigning keywords to different things like keeping track of mileage for trip expenses, expenses for different clients or keeping track of different sources of money (VISA, MC, Cash…)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 @ 3:34 pm. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or trackback from your own site. Your comments will be moderated [if you have never previously commented] but will appear as soon as humanly possible.