New phone finally

Ahh, yes, I do still have a blog, don't I? I figure by now that most people won't even be reading this anymore since I have failed to update it but once a month about. Anyway, Not much has happened, so now you're filled in. I saw some movies, applied for a crapload of jobs, and most importantly - got a new phone. I 'upgraded' my cingular account through amazon and got the Blackberry 8100 (Pearl) for free. It is a pretty nice little deal. It has a message center that keeps all my emails and text messages etc in one place and immediately up to date. It is fairly customizable as far as themes, layout, which icons get shown, uploading 3rd party apps and games, etc.

Parts of it aren't as keen as what I've seen on the iphone, as far as the media player on here, but it all works well enough for me, and has enough flash to keep me entertained. I already added gmail and yahoo mail right to my 'start' page, so that makes it pretty darn convenient. And it'll notify me if there is new mail from either account. I could do that with my hotmail account as well but I don't want to hear a ding every 2 minutes when new spam is delivered.

I'm still working out some of the apps and games. Quite a few of the apps seem redundant. For instance, there are about 4 maps apps, several browser variants, and 'find it' apps like infospace that are like internet 411. I also am trying to figure out how to get java games onto the phone, and also if I can make subfolders on the main screen since now each game and app I load is its own icon and if that stays true for java games I could have an incredibly long main screen.

Speaking of which, the screen looks great. Not touch screen but has a nifty trackball that works real well. The system is real intuitive as far as typing and navigating, although you need to hit the menu button and close programs or else they stay perpetually open in the background, although this doesn't appear to slow the phone down at all and keeps those apps (games for instance) in a frozen saved status that you can easily return to (via a 'switch app' command similar to alt + tab).

The phone has buttons 5 across and 5 deep making each button two letters in qwerty format. Typing is much easier than on my old nokia with three letters per key and the suretype system RIM uses is superior to predictive text. Two programmable soft keys on the side, volume keys on the side, and a mute button on top that can put the phone into 'sleep mode'. I use the right soft key to go into the camera mode: 1.3mp with flash that can be set to auto or always on/off. The left soft key I use for voice dialing. When you hit it you can say "call home" and it will ask to verify that it heard you right, you say yes and it dials. Really nice and convenient, it seems to always do a good job of picking the right number and you don't have to train it at all. With the same key you can say "check signal," "check battery," etc and it will tell you how strong, how much left, etc.

All in all, I like it. I've only had it for about a week though. It doesn't have wifi, the camera doesn't record video (but the phone plays video), and it uses the 3g network but not the new UDMPTS or whatever network that the cingular 8525 uses. I'm happy with it so far, as long as it doesn't break, it's working great. Need to test the bluetooth and try syncing with outlook. The other phones I was looking at were the cingular 8525 ($200 on amazon) and of course the iphone. In the end this phone was free, had the important options I would've used on the other phones, and is very small and lightweight.