Woke up in the mood to write this morning. Luckily, I have something to actually write about.
Why I don’t have an iPhone
Regular readers of this particular blog should already be aware of the pain that was the Blackberry Storm. For me, it was a device that was nothing but trouble. It was slow, the screen wouldn’t completely redraw and it would become unresponsive at least once a day. As it was, I was doing a pseudo battery pull at 2:00am every night* as well as another full battery pull during the coarse of the day. Everyday. Most Blackberries require a battery pull on occassion, but not everyday.
After finally having enough of Storm 4 for the past two week, I finally decided to head into my local Verizon Wireless Store to find out what they could do for me. My plan was to ask them to not give me another Storm, but instead let me upgrade 3 months early to the device you see pictured above, the Blackberry Tour. (Read on…)
You might have seen this yesterday on the Twitter.
Yes, that is correct, I am now in the possession of my 4th Blackberry Storm. The last one had a wonky screen with bad corners and I was a little tired of it.
But that’s not why I’m writing you today.
I had to go to the Verizon Store because teh lad’s phone gave up the ghost. Phone ordered and papers signed, I mentioned mine and before I even finished the sentance, the girl was already reaching into a cabinet and pulling out a replacement. Without even looking at my phone first.
This tells me that Verizon knows this is a problematic phone. No questions asked on a phone swap? I didn’t have to call 611, didn’t have to wait for someone to look my phone over, wasn’t asked a series of questions, nothing. I said it was bad and it got replaced on the spot, no waiting.
Reason #1 I stick with Verizon by the way. There is no way AT&T or Sprint would provide this level of service. On that same note, it would also appear that AT&T and Sprint know better than to sell a pile-of-crap phone like the Blackberry Storm.
Here’s to hoping the Storm 2 or The Tour are better phones are get released soon. Very soon.
Busy busy busy. It’s a good thing business is slow right now because I’ve been pretty busy doing other things. Mainly, getting ready for…
MINI United
For those of you that might have missed it, I’m heading to England this week for MINI United and will be posting photos, video and audio at Motoringfile and White Roof Radio starting this coming Thursday.
Keep an eye everywhere for updates as they happen. A good place to follow along (if you don’t use that fancy RSS all the kids are talking about lately) is the White Roof Radio Twitter Machine. Anything that goes on WRR ends up there, so follow along!
MINI United – Tech
In my bag, besides my toothbrush, will be the following.
- The The Flip Ultra
- Panasonic DMC-TZ3 photo camera
- Canon Vixia HF 100 HD video Camera
- Blackberry Storm (radio off)
- EeePC
- Almost a dozen SD cards of varying sizes and classes
- Edirol R-09 audio recorder
- My toothbrush
I’ll be back next week. Josh is in charge while I’m gone. Try not to piss him off this time, ok?
Evernote finally announced a version for Blackberry phones. Specifically (as of this posting) for the Storm, Bold and Curve. This one has been a long time coming.
We’re very excited about this release because, like a BlackBerry, Evernote is designed to fit perfectly into today’s fluid life/work mix. The minute you need to remember something, take out your BlackBerry and use Evernote to capture or recall whatever it is, then go on with your life. Isn’t it nice not having to worry about forgetting stuff?
It went live on App world yesterday (search Evernote, capital E) as a free download. I grabbed it when it finally went live, installed it and have been playing with it for a little bit and can say that’s it’s not the best solution.
As you can see from the screenshot above, it will allow you to post a text note, snapshot, audio note or a file. Those features work ok, but a little slow on the Storm. You can also view notes, but doing that or almost anything else launches the Evernote Mobile site in the browser.
If you do more than post text to Evernote, then this is definitely the app for you. However, if you use Evernote primarily to leave text notes for yourself, there are other ways to do that that work better in my opionion.
If you are a Twitter user, you can friend up @myen. After you do that, you can then link your twitter account to your Evernote.
Once that is done, you can send a D myen SMS message via Twitter (short code 40404 if you are in the US) and it will automatically show up every where you have Evernote running.
If you have been dying to get Evernote on your Storm, go ahead and get it. When frustration sets in because the app is too slow or you hate the BB browser, try the twitter method instead.
There is a very good chance that I will be going to England over Memorial day weekend, for those of you that haven’t heard. MINI United 2009 is coming up and they have asked us to head on over and cover it for WRR and Motoringfile. Should be fun!
I have a couple of issues before heading over the pond however. One of them is communication. Verizon, while selling me this fine Blackberry World phone (even has a SIM card), wants to charge me an exorbitant amount of money to use that feature of my phone. I could go the Pre-paid SIM route, but getting the unlock codes for my phone is a serious pain in the ass (so I have read) and isn’t always successful.
Looking around a bit last night, and playing with teh lad’s iPod Touch, I had a lightbulb moment. No, a lightbulb didn’t actually appear, but you know what I mean. Look at the photo above and think on that for a minute.
Yes, it’s a microphone for the iPod Touch. Yes, it works with Skype on the iPod Touch. In fact, there is a whole bunch of them over at Touchmic.com. They work with current and previous generation iPTs.
Ok, it’s not an ATP, but it would work for me as long as I had WiFi, which I am pretty sure I will.
Has anyone used one of these mics, or any microphone, on the iPod Touch?
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