Random Thoughts

I've documented my trials with mobile technology in my past few posts and the story hasn't been great. I was really hoping to move to a new BlackBerry this autumn when a) the BB 10 device would be released and b) my wretched contract with my provider would expire.  I have one more month to go for my contract to expire. After that, I fully intend to move away from my mobile provider because they cost far too much. However, I have no phone to move to. I looked at the Galaxy S III and it seems like an excellent phone apart from the giant size it comes in.  Research In Motion seems to have delayed release of their product until sometime in 2013. While I understand that moving to a new platform, re-creating everything and getting it right can be quite a painful process, I didn't expect this. Now, as most Canadians, I have a vested interest in this company's viability. Lots and lots of our financial instruments invest in RIMM heavily. Why? It is one of Canada's m...

I ran a relay race today. It was no ordinary race, you run uphill for 10km, then you do the grouse grind, then at the top of the grind, you run up the ski hill portion of the mountain, and run back down. The race is called the Seek the Peak and it is a challenging race indeed. My co-workers and I formed two teams and finished the race in a little over 2 hours and change . I did the grind portion of the race, which is the usual trail I hike most weekends.  I had to get up rather early (for a Sunday) to make the race but my team mates were there earlier (I was doing leg 3 of a 4 leg relay). Now, the race is open to solo participants as well and the majority seemed to be solo athletes. The first person to finish the race did so in under an hour and a half . Now, to give some perspective, here's what they accomplished: they ran a little over 3k on fairly flat terrain (an elevation change of 90m), then they ran 6km with an elevation change of over 500m and then hiked a mountain an...

Due to an unfortunate incident with some snow and a bout of silliness, my dear beloved BlackBerry's keyboard decided to give up on me. And along the way, after trying many older telephones and buying a new one even , one of my co-workers dropped off his Google (well, HTC) Nexus One. Life hasn't quite been the same since. On the one hand, this device is leaps and bounds better than my berry. It has a nice touch screen, and most of google's apps are front and centre. More importantly, it has a great browser and enough apps to satisfy anyone who has an app fetish. Incidentally, it doesn't have flash installed (I didn't install it on purpose), and that actually stops a great deal of terrible pop-up advertisements (one of the banes of the PlayBook). I installed Swype on it to type and am impressed by it. It seems to learn well enough and is quite forgiving with my fat fingers swiping over the wrong words. Prior to Swype, I was using the stock Android keyboard, a...

A week ago, something important happened in my life. I skied Whistler for the first time ever. If you don't count the time I sort of limped down the mountain on a snowboard, many years back. It was, by far, the best ski day of my short ski season. The conditions, terrain and my skill level allowed for a much better experience than before.  But that's not what this story is about. This is about my now crippled BlackBerry Tour. I've had BlackBerry devices since 2005. For a while, I had 2 devices; a personal phone, and a work BlackBerry. That changed when RIM released the Pearl 8100. I got mine in late 2006 and never looked back. This was still well before the iPhone and the madness that all these apps bring about. The Pearl still works btw. As part of my ski trip, we took a break for lunch. I noticed that the pocket where I had my phone  was not zipped up all the way. And I had many a tumble in knee-high pristine powder. Still, my phone seemed to work, mostly. I not...

In February, Research in Motion's much anticipated update to the BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.0 was released.  I have had my PlayBook for a few months prior to that and wanted to put down some thoughts I had on the update and what is still lacking. First, the keyboard. The Swiftkey powered keyboard's auto-suggest interface is a lot better than the previous iteration of the keyboard. It isn't quite the phone's keyboard yet, but I do find the full word suggestions (including non-standard words like my name) to be useful. I find it annoying that not every app uses it though, but that may be because developers didn't know they could. I am hoping they fix that. Startup time has gone up dramatically. I typically turn off my tablet as I hate fishing for the charger. I haven't measured this to mark out the differences in time, but I noticed that starting up from a full shutdown take a LOT longer than it previously used to. I am not so thrilled about this regress...

On Boxing Day, as I was wandering the stores looking for ski boots, I came across the BlackBerry PlayBook. Well, not quite. I sort of went looking for it in the hopes that one wasn't available.  I've been debating the place of a tablet in today's home and frankly, I couldnt find a reason one would buy one. But there I was, on the Feast of St. Stephen, walking out of London Drugs with a PlayBook. I justified getting it in many ways. It was relatively cheap (I paid $249 for the 32GB version; compare that to  $620 you would pay for the iPad 2), in fact, cheaper than my 32GB iPod touch I bought a few years back. It would be useful to test apps and things (I've been intending to build some apps for a while now) and I could use it at home to look up stuff when my computers were not on (which isn't as rare as I thought it would be). None of this really justifies buying one of these devices, but what can I say... I saw something shiny and nice... and I fell for it. ...