iPhone 3GS Review 1

I’m not sure the traditional ‘what I like’ and ‘what I don’t like’ review will fit here. Apple thinks outside of the box so I think I’ll just combine the review. You will catch on.

Email

iPhone email is not all the way there yet but it is so close that it is knocking on a partially opened door. The set-up (to me) lacks just a little when compared to the Blackberry product line. My BB Bold took just a very few minutes to configure and it works every single time, every day of the week…….it just works. Like I said, Apple is getting close. Now with a really nice MS Exchange Support feature, Apple is knocking on the door of business and I can tell you I saw some bright minds last week in Europe and the folks that were using their iPhones seemed a bit happier than those of us using Blackberry products. I love the push email from Blackberry and I like the fact that I do not have to pay the $99.00 fee just to have the feature. Apple needs to get with the program here and realize this is standard service I should not have to buy MobileMe every year to get what Blackberry already bundles? Are you listening Apple? Summary: I like iPhone email……almost.

Keypad

It took me a little time but the touch screen keypad works. I just don’t think it is quite as fast as pumping out emails on my BB Bold. However, having said that, I would not want a physical keypad on my iPhone. In fact, that would be a real ‘mood killer’ for me. One of the things I like about the iPhone is not having a gadget that has a flip or slide-out keyboard or a front mounted keyboard that uses precious screen space. I do appreciate the ability to now rotate the device for a larger keyboard view on many programs. It does help folks with fat fingers like me. My suggestion would be to offer 3-5 various keyboard sizes in the ‘settings’ menu so that the user could pick the size that best fit. Summary: The keypad is a bit crampy for me but with a little use I overcame and did enjoy but still prefer the on screen vs. buttons for this application.

Internet Browser

Do you remember how insanely crazy I was over the BB Bold e-mail functions? I can tell you, iPhone internet browser (Safari) crushes all of the competition I have seen in this market. In fact, when on a trip, if my family requires information that must be found online the iPhone 3GS is our first choice. We can pay bills, browse any page, look at news……….and we can do all of this in the time it takes to fumble through the opening pages on my Bold. Yes I have mini Opera on my Black Berry and it is still lame beside the Safari used on iPhone products. I have nothing negative to say at all about the browser on the iPhone until a competitor gets within the same century as Apple……then I’ll offer a suggestion or two. Summary: Browsing the way a mobile device should browse. In comfort and in style……..and intuitive!

Communicating with "Generation Y" at the Customer site

http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=160161216551&topic=24770

Guess what folks, we are getting older! Pretty simple concept, huh? Did you know Apple recently hired a college grad who had never used email or read a newspaper? This grad was highly sought after. His methods of communication consisted of only Social Network accounts. He felt that email was 'taboo' and the 'old way' for simple and common communications. Why e-mail from one computer to another when a person can chat & video directly from one mobile device to another?

Think about it..........in 10 years communication will not look as it does today.

Just for giggles........anyone following Google Wave? Imagine the power we have to communicate transparently and in real time with our customer? Two-way dialog with all needed media involved.

http://wave.google.com/help/wave/about.html

No paper, no airline ticket, no jet-lag..........simply start choosing the poisons that are eliminated from the process.

Think the customer would hate this? I spoke to one of our top customers last night, he wondered why we had not moved in this direction 5 years ago.

Very sobering, when asked why they did not tell us earlier, he stated, "We assumed you were the best in your industry and knew what you were doing.!"

This is PROFOUND! Somewhere in the process the customer did not feel our relationship was transparent enough to tell us this. This is not the fault of the customer this is where we as suppliers have not thought into the future. We have been so consumed with keeping our jobs and making it through the recession that we forgot about 'Generation Y'.......the leaders of tomorrow at the customer site.

I spoke with another customer this week that said most paper he picks up at trade shows and from sales calls get tossed to the 'recycle bin'. He says, "At least we're being 'Green' in the process".

Please offer your ideas here. Discuss openly.

It's a new world..........same customer, new generation of leaders.

kl

Knowledge-Fest......Innovation Is Not Dead

Just returned from a week of soul cleansing. I've been couped up in a plane today for 13 hours so my feeble mind can not do the topic justice tonight.......however, I must say......Innovation is not dead in this world.

I have tasted of it this week. I have seen peoples from many nations united at heart.

It is soul-food for the mind. Give me a day to get over this jet lag and I'll give you a taste of this soul-food of the mind!!!!!!!

kml

2009

On The Road Again........

Once again on the road. Will be in the UK tomorrow.......then Switzerland the rest of the week.

Next in line for the blog will be iPhone 3GS reviews.

Stay tuned.........

kml

2009

Blackberry Bold – Review # 2 – 2009

Now for the handful of things that I’m not so happy about on the Blackberry Bold.

Media Player

It is OK. Maybe to some it is great. Too bad for Blackberry that I picked up an ipod a few years back. Other pieces of hardware that try to do music & video seem to pale in comparison to ipods. The media interface is mediocre and it does not seem like high quality to me. It feels like media was an afterthought …………somewhere way after email.

Voice Mail

I must do a ‘before’ and ‘after’ here. Voicemail before AT&T offered Visual Voicemail on the Bold reduced me to the basic cell phone voicemail. It was a pain in the butt and quirky. The little message symbols went away sometimes after clearing voicemail and other times I had to pull the battery. However, with Visual Voicemail, all of my Blackberry Voicemail issues went away. It’s now very easy to use and intuitive. I must add here that I suspect the Voicemail issues were always an ‘AT&T’ issue rather than a ‘Bold’ issue but it was still aggravating to say the least.

Internet

I saved this to last because to me Blackberry has absolutely failed miserably in this area. And YES before anyone suggests it, I have tried both Bolt and Mini Opera for Blackberry and to me they are both lame attempts to correct the largest flaw on any Blackberry device. If I needed my Blackberry for heavy internet use, I would take a sledge hammer and smash each piece into powder. Reading web pages (and pdf files) is like going to a proctologist that has huge fingers. It is painful and embarrassing……….and sadly this one feature would drive me to another device in the future if Blackberry does not fix it. Don’t give me the ‘well it is so good with email that you don’t need internet’ story. That story may have worked before the iphone but not in 2009. Blackberry, fix the internet engine and you will remain highly successful for many years. Ignore it at your own peril.

Your thoughts?

kml

2009

My Blackberry Bold – Review 2009

Well, I picked up my Blackberry Bold last November 2008. I immediately fell in love with some of the features. I’ll spend a day or two on the Bold and then I’ll address the iphone 3GS (my wife’s) next week.

Email

I was new to Blackberry until November of 2008. I can not speak to any earlier models of Blackberry devices. Email was the first thing that jumped out and ‘smacked me in the face’ with the Bold. WOW!!! Within 10 minutes of leaving the AT&T store I was getting e-mail from all 4 of my accounts. (2 Gmail accounts, 1 Bellsouth account and 1 MS Exchange Server account) It was just that easy and it has remained that easy. Email is what my Blackberry does best. I know of absolutely no way I would change email, period. Every device on the market would do well to pattern email after the Blackberry model. Did I mention that I love Blackberry email??

Blackberry Messenger

If your friends have Blackberry devices, there is no easier way to text them than Blackberry Messenger. I should add that Blackberry Messenger 5 was released this week (October 2009) with the barcode scan feature. Scan your friend’s device and it loads them to your BB Messenger friends list. Simple, intuitive and the way all messengers should work on any platform. I love this feature and use it daily.

Track Ball

Being a former Palm 750 user, I thought I would hate the track ‘ball’ on the Blackberry Bold. The first week, I hated the track ball. After the first week, I could not imagine any Blackberry without a track ball. Mine has been flawless and based on the UI of the device I think the track ball was the best solution.

Keyboard

I’ve been a Palm fan for years. I used several of their keypad/touch screen combos for years. I thought they were nice until I used the Blackberry Bold for 2 weeks. If the Bold can be beat in terms of style and accurate key boarding, I’d like to see the device that could do it.

Tomorrow you’ll get the things I do not like about my Bold.

Your thoughts?

kml

2009

Apple Snow Leopard vs. Windows 7

I gotta offer one more day of this......I am a tech junkie, forgive me......this article is too much not to pass along!!! I have pasted the link and posted the text here.

http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/08/whats-wrong-with-windows-7/

What's wrong with Windows 7

Posted by Philip Elmer-DeWitt

October 8, 2009 6:18 AM

Reading between the lines of Walt Mossberg's review

Photo: Microsoft

It's a given that Windows 7, scheduled for release in two weeks, is an improvement over Vista. But how does it stack up against Apple's (AAPL) Snow Leopard?

The definitive word comes in Thursday's Wall Street Journal and All Things Digital from Walt Mossberg, the diminutive dean of tech journalists and a man who takes his software reviews seriously. After testing Windows 7 for nine months on 11 different machines, he has pronounced it "the best version of Windows Microsoft (MSFT) has produced." (Ring a bell? See UPDATE below.)

"I still give the Mac OS a slight edge," he writes, "because it has a much easier and cheaper upgrade path; more built-in software programs; and far less vulnerability to viruses and other malicious software, which are overwhelmingly built to run on Windows. Now, however, it’s much more of a toss-up between the two rivals.

"Apple will have to scramble now that the gift of a flawed Vista has been replaced with a reliable, elegant version of Windows."

Mossberg has written a positive review; he has plenty of good things to say about Microsoft's latest operating system, and anybody who is seriously interested in buying it should read the whole thing.

But if you want to know what's wrong with Windows 7, we've excerpted the juicy bits below the fold.

In Walt's words:

• On a couple of these machines, glacial start-up and reboot times reminded me of Vista.
• On a couple of others, after upgrading, key features like the display or touchpad didn’t work properly.
• Windows 7 still requires add-on security software that has to be frequently updated.
• It’s tedious and painful to upgrade an existing computer from XP to 7
• The variety of editions in which Windows 7 is offered is confusing.
• Microsoft has stripped Windows 7 of familiar built-in applications, such as email, photo organizing, address book, calendar and video-editing programs. [They can be downloaded free of charge.]
• Windows 7 still isn’t quite as natural at networking as I find the Mac to be, but it’s better than Vista.
• In my tests, [a new feature called HomeGroups] worked, but not consistently, and it required typing in long, arcane passwords.
• The Mac still started and restarted faster than most of the Windows 7 PCs. But the speed gap has narrowed considerably, and one of the Lenovos beat the Mac in restart time.
• In the name of security, Vista put up nagging warnings about a wide variety of tasks, driving people crazy. In Windows 7, you can now set this system so it nags you only when things are happening that you consider really worth the nag.
• The system for upgrading is complicated, but Vista owners can upgrade to the exactly comparable edition of Windows 7 while keeping all files, settings and programs in place.
• Unfortunately, XP owners, the biggest body of Windows users, won’t be able to do that.
• They’ll have to wipe out their hard disks after backing up their files elsewhere, then install Windows 7, then restore their personal files, then re-install all their programs from the original CDs or downloaded installer files.
• Then, they have to install all the patches and upgrades to those programs from over the years.
• Microsoft includes an Easy Transfer wizard to help with this, but it moves only personal files, not programs.
• This painful XP upgrade process is one of the worst things about Windows 7 and will likely drive many XP owners to either stick with what they’ve got or wait and buy a new one.

"Bottom line," writes Mossberg, "Windows 7 is a very good, versatile operating system that should help Microsoft bury the memory of Vista and make PC users happy."

UPDATE: Kudos to reader Jon T. of Cardiff, Wales, for digging up this quote from Mossberg's review of Vista:

"After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced." — Wall Street Journal, Jan. 18, 2007

"After using pre-release versions of Windows 7 for nine months, and intensively testing the final version for the past month on many different machines, I believe it is the best version of Windows Microsoft has produced." — Wall Street Journal, Oct. 8, 2009

Your thoughts?

kml

2009