Brian @ Wongside

It’s been over a month since I got a Blackberry Tour. Four weeks after I got it, I took it back thinking I’d like to try out the iPhone clone: the Blackberry Storm.

In short: I was sorely disappointed.

I think my biggest complaint was that the Storm was really laggy and froze on me about half a dozen times in the three weeks I had it. My biggest praise was that it was a touch screen. Other than that, here’s some additional thoughts:

Pros:

• It is a touch screen in the truest sense of the word. You need to physically interact with the screen itself. (See cons for the downside.)
• Despite having the same resolution, the screen is physically bigger (3.25″ vs.  2.44″) than the Tour’s, which makes it a joy to use things like Google Maps.
• The QWERTY keyboard found in landscape mode is nice, big, and wide.
• The icons are big, so they’re easy to hit, even with big hands like mine.

Ambivalent:

• Battery life was better than the Tour, but still not anywhere near the 15 days of standby it advertises.

Cons:

• It’s more of a “press screen” than a touch screen. Having used Charlene’s iPhone on occasion, I’m totally used to what I would consider an excellent touch screen experience. Having to actually press the screen down is really a nuisance.
• It froze repeatedly. One time it gave me a red, green, blue, black, and white static-y looking screen. When that popped up, it refused to do anything. I had to pull the battery and restart the phone in order to get it to work again.
• I don’t know that you could really call it this, but it takes forever to “reboot.” I see it as a phone, which is really meant to be turned on.  Conversely, I guess it’s technically a mini computer, which does “reboot.” In any case, it took upwards of 2 minutes for it to go from fully off to ready to accept input. How absurd!
• The sensor it uses to determine orientation is really flawed. Half the time I wanted it in portrait, it rotated landscape. Half the time I wanted it in landscape, it turned portrait on me. This was quite frustrating, and often left me shaking it in an attempt to get it to the orientation I wanted.
• Every time I got a voicemail, I got a text message letting me know I had a new message. This was common to both the Tour and the Storm, and it was really annoying. I don’t know if this was a Verizon thing, or a Blackberry thing, but it had me quite irked. What this essentially meant was that any time I missed a call and got a voicemail, I had three notifications on my phone: a text message, a missed call, and a voicemail. In order to get rid of all three, I had to check my text messages, my call log, and call my voicemail. Again, this happened on both my Tour and the Storm, but I’ve never had it happen on any other phone I’ve owned.
• The SureType keyboard in portrait mode was horrible, especially for typing passwords. It always thought it new what my password was, and mixed up the letters, the case, or both.
• Typing was miserably slow. Because you have to physically press down the screen, you also have to wait for it to pop back up before pressing the next key. I don’t have any empirical measures, but I’d guess I was at least 25-33% slower on the Storm than on the Tour.
• No good sleep/lock mode like the iPhone. Hit the screen at any point, and it asks if you want to unlock, make an emergency call or cancel. I was always scared I’d pocket dial 911. There were a few times where I was faced with the screen that asked me if I really wanted to make an emergency call, so I think I was only one screen press away. Aye yah!
• I have no idea if this is a Blackberry limitation, or a Verizon Wireless one, but whenever I was on a call, the data mode wouldn’t work. In other words, I couldn’t be on the phone and surfing the web at the same time. It even knew that this capability wasn’t available because it actually told me I It wouldn’t load my e-mail or the maps either. That made it hard to multi-task on the sucker.

Again, the kicker for me was the constant freezing.  I had the phone less than three weeks, 6 times in 21 days is once every 3 or 4 days. And the lagginess of it was unbearable.

I guess I can always hope that Verizon get’s a host of new smart phones in the near future. If they got the Pre, that would be a pretty good deal, and hopefully RIM gets their act together and makes a Storm 2 worthy of being version 2.0.

In the mean time, I’ve got a dead KRZR, so I’m without a “modern” phone.  Until then, I’m back to my dad’s old, trusty LG VX3200, which is close to 5 years old by now.  It’s quite functional, and still has a pretty decent battery life.  That’s more than I can say for the Blackberry Storm.

Intel has a really great high-level overview of what it takes to make an Intel processor. If you’ve ever wondered, here are the pages and the pictures to help you out.

Here’s an interesting article on why HD Video Downloads don’t look so great. Apparently, “hi-def” isn’t a really well regulated or defined measure of video quality. When you have bit rates that range from 1.5-40 megabits per second, it’s easy to see why there’s a range in quality.

This can’t be good news for Apple. Michael Arrington, one of the most powerful men on the web according to Forbes, is giving up his iPhone. He was an avid fan of the iPhone when it first came out, but apparently, the debacle over Google Voice was the last straw.

In the article, Arrington declares that he’ll be moving to an Android-based phone for the time being, and when Google offers Google Voice on the Palm Pre, he’ll move to that.

I’ll bet a certain CEO in Cupertino is about to blow a gasket.

As a follow up to my entry on my new Blackberry, it seems that AT&T might be doomed if they loose exclusivity to the iPhone.

I know from personal experience that Charlene’s reception on her iPhone is less than stellar. Tech Crunch seems to have similar sentiments.

I’ve been unable to do a speedtest on my Blackberry as all of the web-based tests seem to require Flash. But based on my observations, it seems decently speedy. Granted, I’ve never tried to watch YouTube on it. As I mentioned before, I do wish it had WiFi, though. Oh well.

I got a Blackberry Tour last Tuesday from Best Buy. After playing with it for a week, here’s a random assortment of impressions, some good, some bad:

Pros:

• Google Apps are amazing! Super easy to set up E-mail for Google Apps as well as importing my Google calendar.
• My calendar was sync’d in about 10 minutes.
• Love running multiple apps at once, like Pandora in the background while e-mailing someone, or having music fade when making a phone call.
• Amazingly enthusiastic, even fanatical blackberry community. Many answers are only a google search away.
• Browser is pretty fast.
• Blackberry App World has some pretty nifty programs, especially Pandora.
• Applications are easy to download, install, and uninstall.
• Not necessary to get all applications through one central store (a la Apple App Store), you’re free to get them from the vendor if available.
• Video playback capabilities are amazing.
• Nice to be able to record video. Not sure about the quality.

Ambivalents:

• Has a flash for the camera, but takes forever to shoot.
• Keyboard is a bit small.  Takes some getting used to. Nice to have tactile feedback, though.
• Wish I could nest folders for apps, settings, etc.

Cons:

• Confusing how certain programs show up in the manual, but don’t show up on the device.
• Noticed that about 2 hours after purchasing, more icons automatically showed up: browser, My Verizon, etc.
• Annoying that every program has a Terms of Service
• Confusing how sometimes you press the menu button for something, but others you press the trackball.
• Wish I could put more icons on the homescreen.
• No wifi, would be especially nice at home.
• Annoying how I have to pay for turn by turn directions to Verizon for $10/month.
• Weird to receive a text message each time I get a voicemail.
• Recent calls is a bit confusing. No easy way to get there.  Why do I get a message each time?
• Unable to show more than 12 icons when inside of a folder.  Seems like a lot of wasted “white” space (it’s really black).
• Annoying that the phone can’t be in standby and locked mode with one key.  Requires two key presses.
• Typing passwords is complicated because it’s hard to know what entries are being pressed, e.g., 1 vs W or 2 vs E.
• Browser leaves something to be desired.
• How do you dial letters? It’s not immediately obvious, and the intuitive thing to do (actually pressing on the letters themselves since it’s a QWERTY keyboard) isn’t the right thing to do.  It’s close, but not quite. The answer is to press the ALT key while typing the letter, so to dial GOOG-411, you would type press and hold the ALT button while typing “GOOG” and then release the ALT key before pressing 411.  Not the most intuitive way to do it.
• Silencing the phone doesn’t really silence it–the alarm will still go off in silent mode (huh?). Can’t seem to find any documentation on this. Looks like I actually have to disable the alarm in order for it to be silent.

Unfortunately, that’s a rather long list of Cons and Ambivalents. I’ve got 30 days to figure out whether or not I really want to keep this thing. After being without my Handspring Visor for a few years, it’s really nice to have my calendar on me at all times.  It’s quite convenient.

I keep going back and forth in my head about whether or not to keep this. Part of me really hopes that the iPhone comes to Verizon in 2010. If that’s the case, then I’ll likely return this thing and wait another few months. If it gets pushed back to 2011, it might be worth my while to keep this Blackberry and use it until the new iPhone arrives.

Hmm…I guess I’d better take really good advantage of my 30 days.

I’m currently a subscriber of AT&T DSL. But because they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse, I’ve now subscribed to Comcast High Speed Internet (HSI). Since I have both pipes currently coming into my house, I figured I’d give them a whirl and see who’s faster, and whether or not cable is really 10 times faster as they claim. I’ll give you the results and let you be the judge.
Here’s the results from my AT&T DSL speed test at speedtest.net:

And here’s the results from Comcast:

I got similar outcomes from Speakeasy (no fancy graphics here):

AT&T DSL:
Download: 5170 kbps
Upload: 657 kbps

Comcast:
Download: 15875 kbps
Upload: 4451 kbps

That looks pretty fast to me. It’s hard to tell to what extent Comcast’s results are affected by their supposedly “secret sauce” Powerboost technology rather than simply better overall speeds, but it’s hard to argue the results. Say goodbye, DSL.

I’m in the market for an online backup solution. Historically, I’ve backed up my stuff to CD and DVD. But since I now have over 100GB of photos, it’s getting a bit unwieldy. The 1TB hard drive likely won’t help the situation either.

I’m looking at a few solutions, namely:

• Backblaze
• Carbonite
• Mozy

Backblaze is probably the newcomer to the group. I first heard about them on my favorite tech news site: Arstechnica. I think the thing I like about them is tye keep it stupid simple, and have a pretty nifty restore function no one else has: if your computer dies, (for a fee) they’ll mail you a DVD or USB hard drive full of your data. The one concern I have about Backblaze is the very fact that they are young. They seem to have an all-star team of leaders, but they’re such a young company, it’s hard to tell what their future is. I did find at least one user who switched from Mozy to Backblaze. Backblaze costs $5/month or $50/year

Carbonite seems pretty similar on the backup side, but doesn’t seem to offer a similar restore process. I think the one thing that concerns me about them is that they lost a bunch of their customers’ data earlier this year. Carbonite costs $54.95/year.

Mozy seems like a decent company. I think the one thing they have going for them is that they’re a part of storage and infrastucture giant EMC. That means they’ve got some serious backing, and likely won’t disappear anytime soon. I also like the fact that between Mozy and Carbonite, Walt Mossberg prefers Mozy.  The downside is that someone else found that it was a pain to restore from them. The fact that they give 2GB of free space is nice, but I’ve got almost 200GB I’ll need to backup, so that’s really immaterial to me. Mozy costs $4.95/month or $54.45/year.

There are a few downsides to doing online backup, and they certainly deserve special consideration:

1. Uploading takes forever. I’ve got a 6mbps DSL line, and Speakeasy says my upload is only 650kbps, meaning I could upload about 6GB per day. (Speedtest.net generally confirms this.) If I have to upload 200GB of data, that’s 33 days straight.
2. These services are subject to failure. I don’t worry about security as all of these solutions do proper encryption. But as noted above, Carbonite lost the data of 7,500 customers. I don’t think Backblaze was even in existence yet, but their data center of choice had a power outage in 2007. I’ve yet to hear of any problems at Mozy. Fortunately, neither of these issues is ultimately catastrophic to the data (the issue of credibility is entirely different). Since these are backup services, Carbonite customers should have been able to do a re-upload or “re-backup” and have their information be safe once again. Assuming they were in existence, Backblaze customers merely would have needed to wait for the servers to come back up in order to continue a backup or restore–no data was lost.
3. What happens if the companies disappear? Upline was a backup service provided by tech giant Hewlett-Packard. It shut its doors earlier this year, proving that even Mozy–as a part of EMC–might not be immune to being shutdown by it’s corporate backers.  Backblaze might not have to worry about the corporate bueracracy, yet. But what if they aren’t profitable, or run out of funding before hitting the black? They could very well shut their doors as well. And if they get bought by another company, their policies might change to the detriment of consumers, or their new overlords might shut them down for whatever reason.

All in all, I think an online backup service will serve as a secondary or tertiary backup solution around here. I’ll likely keep backing up to DVDs (or Blu Ray when I can get my hands on a burner) and to Charlene’s computer, and have an online, continuous backup solution in the cloud.

I’ll keep you posted as I find more, and when I make my decision.

Every once in a while I get an e-mail from Dell with their latest products and specials. I had to do a double take when I saw the new Studio One 19. Can anyone say 19″ iMac clone? C’mon Dell!  Get with the program. When will you learn to start leading again, rather than following everyone else?

Let’s see an original, well-executed product coming out of Round Rock! Dell, I’ve long been a fan, and I’m a voracious consumer of your products. But something’s gotta give because the recent track-record is pretty horrible.

A couple of days ago I mentioned that I got a new 1TB hard drive and ran stress tests on it using Bst5. I figured I’d post the results as if you’re kinda geeky like me they might be of some interest.

Sequential Write Average transfer: 85.6MB/s
Sequential Read Average transfer: 86.9MB/s

RandomWrite Average transfer: 15MB/s
RandomRead Average transfer: 14.8MB/s

Half Stroke Write Average transfer: 71MB/s
Half Stroke Read Average transfer: 19.5MB/s

I’m no expert, and I frankly have no idea what a half stroke write or read is. (Does that mean the hard drive did a half stroke across the drive? I have no idea.) But that seems to be pretty compelling evidence to keep my hard drive defragged. When the drive wrote sequentially, it was nearly 6 times faster than writing to random locations about the drive, and even more so for the difference in read speed.

Anyways, just a few interesting tidbits on a Sunday for you.