Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
Yesterday I needed to do a quick calculation and my phone calculator was the most convenient tool. Little did I know that along with the crippled bluetooth, USB, and phone charger capabilities Verizon Wireless had also crippled the calculator. I was trying to put 6 billion into the calculator, but as soon as I put in the ninth digit I got INPUT ERROR across my screen. Can you hear me now? Motorola V3c from Verizon Wireless, give it a shot.
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Sunday, January 6th, 2008
Imagine if you will a mobile handset that is truly only a phone. Really just a phone - no camera, it cannot play movies or MP3s, and the ringtones are horrid. Motorola has targeted low-end market with their Motofone F3. Our carriers select their phone roster based on what will entice underinformed buyers to jump carriers. If phone users actually had to shell out the up front cash for a phone rather than relying on carrier subsidies I bet we’d have a wide range of phones that do exactly what people want. That said, this Motorola phone is what I want. With a focus on emerging markets like Brazil and India Motorola has created a phone with no bloat. Its battery lasts a couple weeks on standby, the reception is great, has very good call quality, and the kicker is that mine weighed in at $42 after shipping - unlocked and without any contract of course. The screen uses eInk technology rather than a traditional LCD. This means it is easy to read in the direct sunlight and uses no power unless it is changing. There will be no splashing dolphin screen saver for this phone, just a 1983 calculator feel. I just got this bad boy this weekend, but after seeing how much better the reception is at my parents house I am already impressed. The only place to get this phone is the Internet, as Motorola does not distribute it in the US or Canada. If you are afflicted with bouts of rage from a Windows Mobile “SmartPhone”, I’d recommend picking up an a phone that is a phone like the F3.
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Friday, November 23rd, 2007
So I have this Windows Mobile phone which I need for work. It is fabulously unreliable, so I got a replacement… a new fabulously unreliable phone. Anyhow, I’ve got contacts… friends, family, all that. It appears that Windows Mobile doesn’t know how to work with a vcard. You need to use ActiveSync on Windows to get contacts over to it. I was using MarkSpace Missing Sync for Windows Mobile - but then I upgraded to Leopard, and I’d need to upgrade to a newer beta version for god knows how much (as a short aside, I can’t imagine how terrible a beta version of this software would be, since the final version 3 barely worked). I tried to get syncing working in Linux with SynCE, but that was a no-go.
So here I am, empty phone, vcard, and a computer freshly booted up into Windows XP. I open up the address book application and import my vcard with all my contacts. This just about freezes my computer, but after an hour of clicking to confirm each card I had my contacts loaded. I then fire up ActiveSync. I check the check box that I would like to sync my address book - and the icon has a little icon just like the built-in address book application. It syncs - yet I have no contacts. It turns out that you need to use Outlook to sync. ActiveSync never really said that. Ok, so I try to export the contacts from Address Book over to Outlook because I had just cleaned them up. They have a little tool to do the export. Unfortunately since my account is set up for exchange, the transfer fails. I then tried to export my newly cleaned up Address Book as a vcard. Sorry - you can only create a vcard out of one contact at a time. So then I export to the other format - WAP, which I assume is Windows Address Book. Yeah, but unfortunately Outlook can’t read those. Ok, so then I try to just go back to the original vcard and import that into Outlook. Even though the Windows Address book can read the vcard and import them (albeit very slowly), Outlook ONLY reads the first contact out of the vcard.
The point is that even when you try to do everything the Microsoft way, you are screwed. This is why they suck. Not because they are evil. Not because Bill Gates is a weenie. They will fail because they are often times a poor technology company that lacks any insight into what people want to do with their computers.
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