New Phone
The Blackberry Pearl finally went through a wash cycle, and has died.
Long live the NEW BlackBerry (Tour 9630) !
So, yes. I’ve got this new BlacBerry Tour 9630 smartphone I’m starting to play around with now. Probably a bit overkill for what I need, but the main advantages (buying decision points) that it has over the Pearl are (in the order of importance to me):
1) Much larger screen size and resolution
2) 3.2 Megapixel camera (as opposed to 2) with autofocus and image stabilization
3) Longer battery life
4) QWERTY keyboard (finally)
5) 3G connection speed
6) GSM (worldwide) network service (although I probably won’t use this much)
The very FIRST things I’m enjoying are the new holster and belt clip that came with the box, as opposed to my old Pearl which had some flimsy pouch thing which I discarded after the first day. The lack of a good holster and clip was probably the MAIN reason my Pearl got dropped over a dozen times.
After the new phone was activated, I tried taking it and the Pearl to Sprint so the data could be transferred, but since the Pearl would not even power on, they said there was nothing they could do! I found that VERY bothersome… I KNOW the data is probably on some chip, unharmed, or at least MOST is recoverable. Another Sprint rep approached while I was making a fuss, and let me know that the Sprint techs there have very basic skills, perhaps capable of replacing a cover, fixing various small issues, but certainly nothing like unscrewing the phone mechanisms and getting to the motherboard where the internal data is stored.
He DID add one other bit of advice… telling me about Skydeck.com which is an online web site that can get access to your phone (Sprint, AT&T, Verizon), as well as importing contact lists (directly from your phone, or Google, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, MAC Address Book, and more). From there it can keep sync’d to your phone, and always show up-to-date info about current contacts, as well as save/store all phone text messages, voicemail, calls, etc both incoming and outgoing. As well as provide you with a way to send messages from the site, or place calls via help from Google Voice using your computer, use a search function on all your text/voicemail, and more. Anyway, I got signed up today with Skydeck.com as well, and am very impressed this first couple hours of playing around with it.
Tomorrow I need to contact someone at AustexPCS to check on pricing of data recovery from the old Pearl. Their card (and site) show quite an extensive list of services, including data recovery from water damaged phone. Being the digital packrat that I am… I guess I am most interested in getting the 1.5 years worth of saved text messages off the phone, and certainly my always important contact/address list. It is an extra hassle to have to find, download, and reconfigure ALL those nice Blackberry apps I already had set up on the Pearl, but I’m pretty sure nothing can be done about transfering my app configs (which includes GPS locations etc), but I’ll ask. Ultimately, this is another FINE example of my growing lifestyle where I do not want to store data on any particular device, which could get lost or damaged…. data should be able to be stored (and sync’d) to remote places, as automatically as possible for safe, off-site storage/retrieval in a none proprietary way.
It looks like Google has a new app (Latitude) which will share your GPS location on a Google map, AND show you the locations of all your friends who are showing their locations too! Yippie! I’ve wanted this from Google for a couple years now, and I think more friend’s phones are capable of GPS tracking. Should add a lot of FUN to social networking :) You should be able to see my live tracking map right under my main picture on the far left column of this blog site.
It’s late. I’m off to bed, but will add more to this post as I get more Apps set back up on the new phone.
