Blackberry 8700

1) While the Internet email service does retrieve messages appropriately under IMAP, it neither marks them as read nor deletes them from the server. It bascially does not follow any of the IMAP protocols besides retrieving messages.

correction...when messages are deleted from the Blackberry device, they are eventually deleted from the IMAP server and subsequently from my Mac Laptop. The real issue is that if I delete messages from my laptop, the Blackberry does not honor those changes when it syncs back up. Shame on you guys. Please fix this!

It would be great if RIM could put an engineer on this. IMAP is a very widely used protocol for allowing messages to be synchronized and stored remotely across devices and is the foundation upon which Exchange is built. It should be a fairly trivial task for the staff at RIM. If they need an economic case, a clean IMAP implementation complete with filing messages would steal man treo users away.

2) I have a Mac with OS X Tiger. The Blackberry has Bluetooth and EDGE. I need to be able to use the blackberry as a wireless modem and this guy http://www.taniwha.org.uk has scripts for every device except the Blackberry. Here is his statement about the Blackberry:

Information for BlackBerry: Unfortunately, the BlackBerry doesn't respond to modem commands from the Mac. There's obviously some trick that the Windows software uses, but I'm not aware of it. If anyone finds out how, please let me know.

update...I spoke with someone at shark modem who was going to touch base with our scriptmaker friend at taniwha.org.uk. Hopefully, this contact will result in some sort of progress.

So, basically I would just like to see some open-standards tweaks. The phone has all the potential and is lacking in a few easily fixable areas.

Second Life named appropriately

Where do you go when you die? I'd like to think that Second Life might be an option some day. The most horrifying think about the prospect of immortality is the idea of watching your mortal friends die off around you. But what if your friends didn't die off? What if they had the same immortal abilities as you?

Second Life could offer this. Maybe it's 200 years off but it's conceivable to think that a consciousness could be moved to one's avatar. A little mind blowing, but fun to consider.

From within second life, it would be easy to interact with loved ones and even 'see' loved ones via a webcam on their computer. When they leave the real world, they become a citizen of Second Life.

The world is infinitely expandable so there would be no population issues. Politics would continue as normal. The body of knowledge could quite posibly grow enormously because, without death, society would not need to continually learn from its mistakes.

I could take immortality under those conditions.

Link

Motorola PEBL

First Impression: Very good. It looks like a smooth black rock that I found on the bottom of a trout river.

Once I opened it up (it's rather strange to open it up), I wasn't a huge fan of the look but it is very functional. The keys are extremely nice and very usable. They have a similar feel to the razr.

It's T-mobile's service so it is a GSM/GPRS phone but importantly it does not have EDGE capabilities. EDGE is the much higher speed data service that is becoming quite common on both the Cingular and T-mobile networks. It seems that, just as with the razr, Motorola missed the EDGE boat on this one which is really a shame.

The first thing I decided to check was the sync capabilities with the Mac OS X Tiger. Before I could sync, I needed to pair the PEBL with my Mac. This was incredibly easy. Very well done. I rarely have an easy experience pairing Bluetooth devices. The second thing to do was to set up iSync to merge my address book contacts into the phone. Very easy setup once again. I have around 500 contacts and the sync took about 10 minutes over Bluetooth. Seems a bit long to me. Unfortunately, when I checked the phone, the contacts were all there but instead of the contacts being grouped by each person, I had 3 entries for contacts who had 3 phone numbers. I checked for some settings to change this behaviour but no luck. To add insult to injury, the contact scrolling is extremely slow, so it would be very difficult to fine the contact I needed with this phone unless I decide to pare down the number of contacts or manually enter them in a consolidated way.

My calendar synced up perfectly. Very nice.

I decided to test the dial-up networking. As it turns out, the phone sent to me was on a pre-paid plan. After a bit of research into t-mobile dial-up networking, I found several very helpful resources. In particular, this article had everything necessary for completing the connection.

http://www.photoethnography.com/blog/archives/2005/06/info_setting_up.html

Once I completed the connection, however, I could not surf since was only assigned private IP addresses. I called customer support and technical services at T-Mobile to see if they could make a switch for me but their hands were tied. In any case, this phone is quite slick, but, like the Razr and the SLVR, I'd hold off until Motorola decides to incorporate EDGE into their products. The Motorola v557 probably offers the best bang for the buck as far as features but it's only really advertised through Cingular from what I have seen.

Writely + Basecamp = Crazy delicious

Basecamp is great. Writely is great. Basecamp has an element called a writeboard but it doesn't touch writely for flexible collaboration. Writely's method of sharing documents in my opinion is much slicker than basecamp because you only need 1 ID to get to all your documents regardless of who the other collaborators may be.

If Google bought basecamp, they could merge these products in a really intelligent way and work it into the google home page....or better yet, google should also buy Netvibes and make modules for their basecamp + writely mashup.

But what do I know?