olexiy prokhorenko’s blog

I was really surprised while digging in the Blackberry App World that most of apps I've been using on iPhone are here, on Blackberry. Not games (I didn't play games on iPhone either, though my son did ;-), but apps which are actually useful. So, here is the list which I downloaded and installed already, and enjoying. I will try to keep it up to date :-)

• TripCase
• Dictionary and Thesaurus
• iheartradio
• Tax Magic by RideCharge
• Flickr

So, as I tweeted earlier, my 4th (fourth) Blackberry Bold 9000 showed it's bad manners and tried to die on my hands. Including used BBs which I got from Craigslist it's 5th, but who counts. In some way every of BBs which I tried gave me a hard time. As much as iPhone gets on my nerves with it's own bugs, it's not even close. I crawled through CrackBerry forum and found that I am not alone! At least few other posts stating that people had at least 1 to 3 exchanges of their Blackberry's due to some malfunction within a year of their life. It gives a lot of information to think that RIM's biggest problem with competition against iPhone and Android is not "applications", or "interface", or whatever else, but the most important thing - reliability. When the phone is a piece of crap - it's not reliable. Even if it has great email, keyboard, many other features - nobody gives a damn. Why would I want to exchange my phone ever so often? Don't know. I've been using iPhone 2G since it was released couple years ago. It's not perfect, slow, does not work as good as "phone" has to work, "bubblish", etc. - but I never got any reliability problem. Yeah, batter ran off. Who cares, we all knew it sucks with battery life. But no sudden reboots, no freezing (which gives the only option to pull of the battery!), no lost icons on restart (requiring one more restart to get them back)... That's not fun, I am telling you.
I wish all the best RIM to figuring out their priorities, but I am stopping my experiments in finding good version of Blackberry Bold 9000 which can live for my needs. Back to iPhone 3GS, and I am going to curse it for being what it is, and only hope Apple fixes it fast with their updates, but at least I know I have some piece of phone working for me. If I would look into Blackberry field again, I would try to research as much as possible about reliability of those phones and exact models I'll be looking into; and probably I would value Android's creatures for now much more than Blackberry. At least, what I want to see anxiously is Verizon's Droid, as I heard a lot of great reviews about it. It will be released tomorrow, as rumors are saying, so probably I'll be able to check it out at Verizon store too.

Great time for fountain! :-)

Click here to download:

BlackBerry_3G_CID1 (7 KB)

Apparently, this thing works incredible easy. Easy to setup, easy to use.

I would suggest to read this thread The How To: To Mac Tethering: Your Problems Solved (http://forums.crackberry.com/f62/how-mac-tethering-your-problems-solved-260401/) on Crackberry, or may own experience is right here:

So, I've been using:

Blackberry Bold 9000 AT&T (4.6.0.297 on 4.0.0.247 platform)
Snow Leopard (10.6.1) on Macbook Air

Steps are the following:

 1. on Mac: turn on Bluetooth
 2. on BB: Setup -> Setup Bluetooth -> ...
 3. on BB: set device name for pairing, click OK, then Listen, it will start waiting for connection
 4. on Mac: System Preferences -> Bluetooth -> Setup new device -> ...
 5. on Mac: choose your mobile phone name, click Continue
 6. on BB: enter passkey which will be on your Mac screen, click Enter
 7. on BB: choose Yes, and check off Do not ask again
 8. on Mac: Bluetooth Mobile Phone setup screen will ask for data
 9. on Mac: Vendor = Other
10. on Mac: Model = Blackberry 3G CID1
11. on Mac: Check off Enable error correction and compression in modem
12. on Mac: Dial mode = Wait for dial tone before dialing
13. on Mac: Dialing = Tone
14. on Mac: Sound = On
15. on Mac: Username = wap@cingulargprs.com
16. on Mac: Password = CINGULAR1
17. on Mac: APN = wap.cingular
18. on Mac: Click Continue
19. Enjoy tethering - Connect Bluetooth DUN and that's it.

It's not 1-2-3, but it's fairly easy.

Before starting - you need to unzip this archive into /Libary/Modem Scripts/ or you will not have proper modem script for the Blackberry Bold.

So, just saying that I am back on Blackberry Bold. Finally iPhone got on my nerves, and after considering different options I figured out the Blackberry would work better for me, and it's more "win" for me now. So, I got rid of iPhone, and more detailed review/comparison of iPhone 3GS battle vs Blackberry Bold will be posted on Crackberry's forum and probably :-) here as well.

Enjoying nice weather and dragons in Coyote Park in San Mateo

So, for the third time I am getting rid of this RIMarkable phone. Awful! I am literally forcing myself not to do that :-) so I can give more competition to Apple :-)

It really didn't make it through the fight with iPhone 3GS. As much as I loved the phone, concept, design factor, message management - I could not find it superior to iPhone. And trust me, I really wanted to see it. As much as I need email management to be perfect on my phone, but I also need all those minor things like maps with GPS, browsing, terminal, etc. which it simply cannot do good enough. RIM rolled out recent BIS update in Northern America and still no two way Google mail sync. Still poor contacts sync with Google. And not only Google, but any Exchange -- you are so limited with what you have there. And even if I was closing eyes to many of it's disadvantages, I found myself much more productive with the iPhone.

I am really hoping RIM will come up with changes and will resurrect. Until then, I am afraid that even Android (which I do not like too much due to the lack on good hardware vendor, as HTC is just "trying", but this is obviously not good enough) has more chances than Blackberry devices.

Don't get me wrong. I am loving Blackberry Bold. It's actually the phone which raised my personal interest and requirements to the phone to the very high bar. It did make me want to handle my emails more effectively, and especially to require more from the phone to actually be *the phone*, not just Internet device (yes, I am throwing this one to you, iPhone!).

Nevertheless, if you line up cons/pros iPhone 3GS wins. However, I cannot stress strong enough that I am waiting for action from RIM. Like really waiting. Rumor has it that Blackberry 9700 (Bold 2 or Atlas or Onyx) is coming in November, and Blackberry may bring some software updates which will be very interesting to accompany it as well. Also there is a rumored Blackberry Magnum or Dakota which may be a hybrid with touchscreen and still QWERTY-keyboard next year. Nobody knows if this will be failure or resurrection. I hope they create nice competition to Apple and Android, so we can see some progress going on.

My son having a lot of fun with all those fountains over here, but
frankly speaking for me it's kind of cold already to be around any
water...