Archive for the 'technology' Category

The BlackBerry Killer?

One of the more incredulous things to be postulated in the wake of the announcement of the iPhone 3G was this tidbit from CNet columnist Don Reisinger:

And although the BlackBerry has led the way, Steve Jobs just dealt a decisive blow that will not only force RIM to capitulate, but could see the end of the BlackBerry line altogether.

Um, say what? That sounds like the delusions of an Apple fanboy to the extreme. Let’s think this through logically.

First of all, there are a lot of companies that have made significant investment in BlackBerry technology, having purchased hundreds (if not thousands) of devices, lines of service for all of those devices, BES licensing, and all of the infrastructure that goes with all of that. If there is one truism about large corporations, it’s that they don’t take to change well. Switching from a BlackBerry to iPhone platform means huge changes to be made, and that also means a very large expenditure of money would have to be laid out for new devices, new lines of service, cancellation fees for existing lines of service, etc. If your existing platform isn’t broken, how do you go about proposing to the folks who sign the checks that you want to lay out hundreds of thousands of dollars for this new technology? It’s a hard sell, especially in today’s economy.

Secondly, while Apple is proposing their new ability to have applications on the iPhone, the delivery mechanism won’t work for most business. While there is over-the-air downloading via the new App store for personal apps and games and the like, enterprise level apps can only be installed via iTunes. Did anyone bother to tell Apple that iTunes is probably application non grata #1 for most corporate IT departments? This isn’t like the BES, which has the ability to push apps wirelessly from within the environment, or the packaging of apps in a binary format that both BlackBerry and Windows Mobile environments use?

Lastly, and this is probably more of a personal gripe, the on screen typing thing for the iPhone seems useless to me to do more than real quick SMS messaging or entering a URL, etc. Once you start working with a BlackBerry keyboard, you realize it’s not that hard to thumb out an essay on the BlackBerry keyboard. Hell, I can even putter away quite quickly on my Pearl’s compressed keyboard using SureType. How in the hell are people who are relying on one of these devices to do super heavy email loads going to last with that touch screen keyboard? I think not.

Thirdly, while they’re not on the same level with the user experience, give RIM credit for trying to beef up consumer level features on the BlackBerry. Any recent BB can play music now, and the forthcoming BlackBerry Bold is really amping up multimedia features and ease of use. No, it won’t kill the iPhone, but it’s a convincing piece of equipment anyway.

All in all, the iPhone remains a top notch consumer device. It does what it does extremely well. I won’t switch to it because of the carrier that’s involved, but that’s just my thing. When you put it all together, though, I don’t think we’re looking at a BlackBerry killer. Not in the least bit at all.

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A Memo to the Gods at ESPN

I have to say that one of the best things that ESPN has done over the past year or so was to start offering some real investment into getting some first class blogs going on their site. Hashmarks, their NFL blog, and TrueHoop, their NBA blog are both loaded with excellent writing, insightful analysis, some great interviews (the guys who write Hashmarks especially, as they are good with getting interviews with GM’s, team presidents, and other high ranking officials), and an in-depth look at stats.

My point is that I would love to see ESPN start up a similar blog for baseball. Right now, they have “blogs” from several of their correspondents that read more like daily dispatches from around the league than real blogs. I do like some of them. Rob Neyer has some decent dispatches that look at what newspaper writers around the league have to say about what’s happening in baseball which are insightful, but it lacks the real dedication that a permanent blogger can add to the mix because all the baseball guys are either TV analysists or columnists for the website in addition and you can tell in the quality of their work that this is the place where the put most of their concentration. It would make a great addition to the world of ESPN to see a baseball blog that’s as in depth and insightful as their excellent NBA and NFL blogs.

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Saltando El Tiburon

Greeting on Flickr

So I log into my Flickr account today and I see this, and the first thing I think was that LOL Speak may have finally jumped the shark once and for all…

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Wii Man!

Yes, seriously.

Honestly, I don’t know what would ever motivate anyone to dress themselves up as a super hero with a giant Wiimote on the front of themselves, but then again, what the hell do I know?

The best part? The Wiimote on the chest actually fucking works. That just raises the hilarity level up by a factor of 100 at least.

(h/t Engadget)

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Ugh

So I bit the bullet and jumped head-first into the realm of 21st century mobile communications and obtained one of these, so I could have my email on the go. As a result of this decision, I consolidated all of my email into my GMail account so that I could sync it with the Blackberry. Around the same time, Google announced that GMail was gaining IMAP access. This is a good thing, because it means that my email can be synced across all of my devices and everything can now be seen in perfect sync. Great, right?

Except, not so much. IMAP access over the Blackberry is so slow that it’s ridiculous. Apparently, this is due to several factors, including that RIM’s BIS service (that’s the service that pushes email to your Blackberry) does not support IMAP-IDLE, which you need to make this stuff work correctly. All it translates to is a less than satisfactory experience for me and feeling like I’ve wasted this time and my excitement, because the whole point was to have a device that allowed me to see my email and keep it in perfect sync with the web and desktop versions thereof. Apparently, as a consumer and not someone in the corporate world (using the Blackberry Enterprise Server solution allows this, which is what you use in a corporate environment with Outlook or Lotus Notes), this remains a mythical thing for me. Oh well. At least my device is cool.

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