Could you Survive 2 weeks without a SmartPhone?

From the looks and messages from people, I would think that it was impossible for some of you to live without your phones.

Imagine you had to revert back to a Blackberry Bold or Curve, I used both but more on that in a minute, could you do it? Sure for a day or 2 maybe but 2 weeks?

The problem started the day before we left for vacation to Israel, the Thursday of Thanksgiving. I dropped my HTC Vivid Android phone and it landed smack on a rock and shattered the glass. Yeah that sucked, but it was still useful, so I made do on our trip.

Either while away or shortly after we returned I ordered a new digitizer off of eBay. When that came in, I proceeded to replace my glass and put it all back together. Powered it on and saw a line cracked and just a shade of red or blue or green and nothing else. Yes, I had damaged the LCD at some step along the way. Back to eBay. Ordered a new LCD which came today.

Took it all apart, replaced the LCD and put it back together and happy to say it is good to go again.

I learned a lot about how I work and how useful or useless a smartphone is to me.

The BB Curve was the slower device I had laying around which is unlocked and I could get all my emails but web browsing was useless and apps were iffy. My friend Paul gave me his old BB Bold which was MUCH faster but still locked down by a BES and so I only had phone service. I decided I would learn to live with my office's iPad but use the BB Bold because at least the browser worked efficiently.

I now know that the Bold had a crappy keyboard with the weird left/right slanted keys, but since I rarely used a BB over the years, despite managing numerous BES environments, I figured I could live with this. But now I was a 3 device person, including the laptop. When my phone is working, I rarely need to use the iPad. I prefer typing on my phone over the iPad.

The iPad, while an excellent reader device, really is lacking in keyboard intelligence or ease of use. In this day and age of alpha-numeric passwords is it so much to ask apple to let me just hold a key down to get to the alternate key or number? Or to hold it down to get a capital letter? My old Nokia phones always did this and that was in 1999.

It is nice to keep so many screens open on an iPad and the battery life is awesome, shame it is such a PITA to type. I could never type this blog post on it without a bluetooth keyboard. But I could go 2-3 days without needing to recharge it.

I did not exactly survive 2 weeks without my phone because I had the iPad by proxy. But my postings or photos from the holidays and trips were limiting and that was a shame. The iPad has a lousy still camera option. It could record sound and video but not great quality. I missed the simplicity of opening one of many apps and take photo and post it. I did not miss seeing my email, not one bit. I did miss my contacts and phone numbers but that also was interesting. I had few calls, thanks to the holidays, and did not need to call too many people either.

So I went semi-cold turkey on social media and came out of it with an interest to do more and looking forward to this year.

For everyone that wondered where I was or why I replied in short or cryptic ways the last 2 weeks, now you know the reason.

SnTM - Fix the Brick!

My wife's Curve from the previous post an 8310 from AT&T was ceremoniously dropped on me at 11PM Sunday night.

"Fix the Brick"

Of course my warnings NOT to do this at night but wait for daytime(service hours) went unheeded.

The life of an computer person is NEVER over at home.

So like any good husband, and IT person I asked:
How do you know it is dead?
Maybe it's just mostly dead.
She said "It's blinking red lights twice in a row and nothing else, no screen, no anything."

A-ha I said, it's mostly dead. S. Morgenstern would be so excited, if he were a real person. So maybe William Goldman reads my blog. A man can dream, can't he?

I asked was the battery charged. Yes.
Did you remove the battery, chip, memory card and try again? Triple Yes.
Kiss it and throw it over her right shoulder(on to the couch) as you pray to the Gods of Waterloo? No, should I.....

So evidently the new desktop software isn't quite ready for prime time to just "Upgrade one's phone".

Quick Google finds this thread about blinking red lights.

Which takes you to this thread which discusses how to "Spoof" the device to reinstall the OS.

Hacking time!

What is really nice was being pointed to this list:
BlackBerry Operating System Downloads which basically provides links to all carriers and then to the device and OS versions.

This link is for the Desktop versions, but you probably knew that already.

Usually I work on BES issues which have similar but different routes to information.

Download the OS, follow directions, wait for the process to finish.

And Wait.
And Wait.
And Wait.

Took long enough for me to write this post!

It took the updates and was reconfiguring itself for a least a 1/2 hour. Finally it woke up and we started the reconfiguration of the device. And then resynching.

Research in Motion, and they really are too!

Gregg Eldred posted this over the weekend and it was mildly interesting to me, on many levels.

Basically, RIM now has a public blog, http://blogs.blackberry.com/. Interesting because last I knew, officially, this was a no-no(and possibly in some cases why you as a blogger may not have been hired by RIM).

I am very glad to see this is out there, although yet to be seen what direction it takes, the initial posts are of interest, especially if you have a Curve.
My wife will finally be happy her phone does what mine does.

Now if we can just get them to blog on Lotus specifics...

So my wife had an issue with her Curve not synching calendars properly. Anything she would write in Lotus Notes would not get synched or crash during synch.

We dealt with this a few times, but the bottom line is it came back and is not funny...to her of course.

My immediate thought was to update the desktop software which she had on her PC and oddly enough there was a release of 4.7 on April 23, 2009.

Excellent!

Download the 200MB+ program, which includes the Roxio(Bad Memory Usage IMHO) Media Manager.

Installed it, waited almost an hour for it to finish, watched the Ascendant/South Park Impact video, and their Lotusphere 2009 video too which includes my image of a Lotus hat at 0:58.

In any event upon restarting the PC the new desktop software now asks to upgrade my wife's Curve. It NEVER did this before. And shows that her device uses 4.3 or earlier versions and can go to 4.5. COOL!

Decided to wait on the update until daytime hours, just in case I fry her phone. Having had a horrible Friday, and I thought best to hold off on the update another day. Posting on that next.

So while waiting for the install as well, I luckily found this post, on the Blackberry support forum site details how to fix the synch failure for her phone.

There seems to be an issue with the Attendee reference in the mapping fields. While I understand why this would create a problem, in theory, none of my wife's appointments include attendees. Well, either way, it's resolved now.

So RIM is NOT dead, I still believe IBM should buy them and am thinking more and more I want 2 phones, an iPhone(once you have clients using it, it begs the necessity) and a Blackberry as my HTC8125(WMD) is just dying a slow and painful, for me, death.

Now to figure out how to use both of these with one chip and one data plan.

Keep up the good work everyone in Ft. Lauderdale and Waterloo and wherever else development gets done.