Yeah–It’s A Crackberry

I was so foolish. Stefanie was so right. I have a Blackberry now… a Crackberry… and the experience is magical

blackjack-w250.jpgFor the last year and a half I’ve been using a Samsung Blackjack. i wanted to be digitally complete. When I got it the word was it was a pretty good smartphone.

I was so foolish. Stefanie was so right. I have a Blackberry now… a Crackberry… and the experience is magical&#185. The Samsung was so clunky in comparison.

Transitioning from one phone to another isn’t easy. Here’s where Google gets involved. I set up a new email account gfthrowaway@gmail.com. I then sync’ed the Blackjack with Gmail. My phonebook flew through the air and into the Googleplex. Next I re-sync’ed, this time sending my contacts from Gmail to the Blackbery. Painless!

I wanted to continue to keep a calendar, but now I had a problem. The calendar and contacts had to be associated with the same email address. A little mumbo jumbo and the new Gmail account was incorporating the calendar from my main account (if there can be such a thing for someone who truly has around 2-dozen email addresses!).

Everything seems to be working fine. The email/SMS setup on the Blackberry is quite well thought out. In fact everything seems quite well thought out. I can’t get Pandora to work–a problem they admit is theirs. Shozu is also a little recalcitrant at the moment.

I pulled the micro-SD card from the Blackjack and inserted it into the Blackberry. How can a billion bytes of data get squeezed into a space so small?

The Blackjack is now, sadly, on the table top upside down, battery, SIM and mini-SD card removed. It’s like the carcass of an old subway car getting ready to be dumped in the Atlantic as an artificial reef. It’s sad really.

On Twitter Jim Heem said, “I’m really surprised this is your first blackberry.” Coolmoomama chimed, “.i REALLY want a blackberry.” Stef is just gloating.

A few days ago my friend Peter said researchers who’d asked about the iPhone and Blackberry got surprisingly different responses. iPhone users talked about the coolness while the Blackberry crowd kept mentioning utility and usefulness.

I’d like to say it’s not that big a deal, but I think it is.

&#185 – I have added Crackberry to the spell checker in my browser. It is now officially a word for me.

5 thoughts on “Yeah–It’s A Crackberry”

  1. “A little mumbo jumbo and the new Gmail account was incorporating the calendar from my main account (if there can be such a thing for someone who truly has around 2-dozen email addresses!).”

    I don’t think Google realizes that people do in fact have multiple accounts. I dislike having to log out of iGoogle to open another Gmail account.

  2. I met someone recently who just switched from the BB Curve to an iPhonebecause he thought that it’s easier to transfer all his iCal and Address Book entries via Mobile Me (formerly iDisk). I explained to him about the Google Sync interface. Not only did he switch from Verizon Wireless, which he had admitted had great coverage compared to at&t, but, he now takes a portable recharging plug with him for meetings. He likes the iPhone, but he puts up with the inconvenience! The idea of having a smartphone is to minimize what we have to schlep. Taking a charger along for meetings defeats the purpose.

  3. Still love my Windows Smartphone. Its an older phone, an Audiovox XV6700, bought on Ebay, and hacked to run Windows Mobile 6.1. Since I’m in charge of IT at my company I’ve got everything set up so that Outlook runs seamlessly on my phone. At this point I can’t fathom using anything but a Smartphone.

  4. I love my CrackBerry. I have the Curve 8330 from Verizon. It’s probably the best phone I’ve ever owned. And I carried a Treo for forever! Well until it died and I went to a non-smartphone, which was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made.

    Honestly, there are 2 phones that *might* pull me off of a CrackBerry. The Jesus..er..iPhone if Apple would give us a real keyboard. Or as a friend said last night, “you mean the Pre?” Which if it came to VZW, might be the other phone.

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