Random Thoughts

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...