Gavin’s Digital Diner

Full disclosure: I’ve been using a Blackberry since … well, since I can’t remember not having one. I love it. I’ve traveled with it all over the world, and it’s worked just about everywhere.

Also I have to add that we have the Blackberry Enterprise Server (known affectionately as Bessie). So this is not a plain vanilla setup. All in all, we currently support upwards of 15 or more users scattered around the world. It’s painless, easy to manage, and easy to support. We even use the neat “intranet” feature (called MDS) to expose some internal web-based information without security risk. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to do. All in all, the software, the devices, the whole experience is elegant, frictionless, and easy.

In recent years, I’ve gotten brave enough to travel only with only a Blackberry, eschewing my laptop for short trips. For me, that’s very brave. I’m not easily separated from my computers.

However, on a recent trip to New York I got so frustrated with the damnable “double-key” keyboard of the Blackberry 7100 series, that I almost threw it out of a hotel window. The long and the short of it: it’s very difficult to have a focused, important email conversation when the damn words keep misspelling themselves. It works “ok” if you have time and patience. Sometimes I don’t. That evening I didn’t.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with the 7100 series, RIM designed it so that it would be “more cell phone-like.” In other words, “honey, they shrunk the keys” to get double-duty by putting two letters on each key. It’s still a QWERTY keyboard, but Q and W share the same key, as do E and R, and T and Y. You get the picture.

In this particular case, I’d type the word “are” and the damn thing would keep guessing the word “see”. The more pissed off I’d get, the more mistakes I’d make, and the more the software would start to guess totally insane words. Instead of being calm, sane, and considered the Blackberry had had turned me into a raging idiot.

When you’re trying to type fast, trying to get a point across in a few seconds… Well, let’s just say that those double-keys had to go or I was going to start pounding my head (and the phone) against a wall somewhere, and in Manhattan it’s easy to find a wall.

The trouble is the 7100 series had evolved to solve its predecessor’s other problem — namely, when using the previous model, it felt like you were holding a frozen waffle to your ear. I really didn’t want to go back to the waffle-phone, with or without syrup.

Enter the 8700g. This baby is slick and shiny new. The full QWERTY keyboard is back, thank god. It’s svelte, just a little slimmer and sleeker. Like a mini-waffle, only sexy. Bottom line, it’s about perfect if you ask me.

Here’s my assessment:

• It feels nice in the hand, stable and easy to hold on to.
• The phone works well (the 7100t was always kind of “iffy”), and it has Bluetooth so if I wanted to, I could walk around with a flashing blue thing stuck to my ear.
• It supports EDGE as well as GSM and GPRS – which means it’s FAST (err, faster I should say. Nothing is really FAST, if you ask me).
• The screen is great. It’s clear, bright and easy to read. I can fiddle with the settings to my heart’s content.
• It has well-thought-out buttons – including one right on the top that mutes the whole damn thing. Handy when you forget to turn off the ringtones in the theater or something.
• Overall it’s faster and more responsive.
• The browser is fast, too (because of the EDGE network).

Interestingly enough, I find that I Google from my Blackberry quite a bit. (Now that’s a statement that would have made absolutely no sense 15 years ago.)

It’s handy to have the world’s knowledge at your fingertips when you’re wandering the streets. For example, a year or so ago, I was somewhere in France looking at some glass windows that dated back a couple of hundred of years. Suddenly I wanted to know who invented glass; how long had we actually had glass? Was I looking at some of the oldest windows in the world or were they just ordinary (400-year-old) windows? One Google later: I knew it was the Romans. (For wine bottles apparently. Smart folks those Romans.) Four-hundred-year-old windows are still pretty neat.

Blackberry Tricks:

Somebody once asked me, slightly amazed, if all my mail went to my Blackberry. It does, kind of.

There are tricks to making it easy to manage. I use the Blackberry to manage my email as it comes in; parsing, sorting, forwarding, and filing. I answer only urgent stuff and trivial stuff from the Blackberry. The biggest benefit, I find, is that I can take care of all the little things, and get rid of all the flotsam and jetsam; letting me easily find and focus on the real things when I return to PC or laptop.

Here’s how:

• First, I set up filters with the Blackberry software. You can do this with BES or with the stand-alone version (Desktop Redirector). Unless it’s to me directly or unless it’s on certain “lists” it never gets forwarded to the Blackberry. That stuff waits for an Outlook session.
• Then, of the stuff that meets those criteria, I sort and parse. I delete, out of hand, the other spam that makes it through, and I delete the other spurious stuff (what I call office-spam) like messages about donuts on the 13th floor, bikes for sale, etc.
• Then I quickly sort and respond to the urgent ones (like call Mom or your pants are on fire.)
• Finally, I mark the rest as “unread” in my Outlook inbox, and then wipe them from the Blackberry using the “delete prior” option. This leaves a copy back home, in Outlook, but purges the inbox queue on the Blackberry. When I get home, all the trash is already gone, the things I need to respond to are still nagging me as unread, and all the urgent items have been taken care or have at least had an initial “I’ll get right to it when I return” response.

Blackberry Essence:

The essence of a Blackberry is that it works. It does what it does, and it does that well. However, it’s not a Swiss-army knife; for those of you that want word processing, spreadsheet, and all that other stuff in their PDA, well the BB is not for you.

What the BB does is email, calendar, contacts, notes, and tasks. It syncs, 100-percent, with my Exchange/Outlook box. I add a note, there’s a note in Exchange. I update my calendar in Outlook, and my Blackberry is up to date too. My contact list is always in sync, and my calendar is both in my pocket and on my desktop. Now if I could just find my keys.

Gavin Clabaugh - June 2006

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