The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

WebOS was a pleasure to work with after a few days with the Blackberry. But then Palm had to mess it up. My Pre checked for system updates and then proceeded to install automatically updates for my 3rd party Homebrew apps. All the updates failed following which all the apps have stopped working. Re-installing them via Homebrew also fails now, and of course they are not available for me on the Palm appstore. Living in South Africa means I fall outside the areas that the appstore is currently available in. One the apps is TweeFree, my only access to Twitter on the Pre.  So now I am back on the Storm 2.  Even though RIM’s appstore is also not available in South Africa, I can at least get 3rd party apps elsewhere. Am using OpenBeak for tweeting on the Storm 2.

The battery is lasting much better today. Have disabled GPS, and 3G. Unplugged it from the charger at 6am. It is now 6pm and the battery has 60% left.

Bluetooth working well with my car kit.

Have the basics going on the phone. Getting my company email, calendar and contacts pushed via my company’s  Blackberry Enterprise Server. Only 3rd party apps installed thus far is the Gmail app and AstraSync. I use gmail for my personal emails, and unfortunately if your Blackberry is connected to a BES then you cannot also push gmail or any other mail service to your device’s native email client. This where the Gmail app comes in, as it syncs with your gmail account, not in the device’s native email client, but in the gmail app. This is great, except the gmail app displays only plain text format – no html links, no rich text format, no images. Not good enough. Every other major platform, with the exception of Symbian, provides html format emails from multiple email sources. The options on Blackberry to achieve this is thin on the ground. You could try Tiggit mail. I have. It is okish. Am now trying AstraSync which performs two-way over-the-air synchronization of email, calendar and contact data with Exchange ActiveSync compatible servers including Microsoft Exchange, MailSite Fusion, Exchange Online, BPOS, CommuniGate Pro, Zimbra, Scalix, FirstClass, Open-Xchange, Kerio MailServer, Google Sync and importantly for me,  with Gmail. Costs US$50 per year, which is not cheap compared to the gmail app which is free, but it does HTML.

Strangely enough I am looking forward to getting the Blackberry Storm 2 in a few days. Unlike most of my mobile phone acquisitions, this one is coming my way courtesy of a network contract renewal. Blackberry is the preferred, actually the only officially sanctioned, push email mechanism provided by my employer, so I have had my fair share of Blackberries – Pearls, 8800, Bold, etc. The Bold is very good and I still use it from time to time. It sucks in a few areas though, specifically web browsing, youtubing and doing my gmails in html. Overall the BB experience is somewhat boring and falls short of the user experience on the iPhone, Android, WebOS and even Symbian I think. I considered the Storm when it was released but decided against it as it had no wifi – what was RIM thinking. And then everyone complained about the SurePress clickable touch screen. The Storm 2 looks quite a bit better though with an improved screen (read somewhere that this screen is the closest you will get to a physical keyboard with a touch screen one), wifi, and 2GB ram. And the web browsing is better than on the Bold. Maybe this will be the phone that converts me to a virtual keyboard. Will see.