The P910 hand-off
I got this message today as I was getting ready to leave the office:
i’m back from the GREs. i am leaving my phone off until i figure out how to get the track wheel unstuck – it automatically selects anything it’s resting on because the wheel is stuck “in,” if that makes any sense.
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And she did awesome on the GREs, naturally.
So while she wasn’t looking I took her BlackBerry, did a backup onto the Super MegaCorp IBM Thinkpad, and synced her Contacts and such into newly created receptacles and set out to whack my old junk on my Sony Ericsson P910. I didn’t realize that it would be such a big pain to get contacts out of Outlook and into a vCard. What on Earth is wrong with supporting an Export to vCard of more than one contact at a time? On the other hand it apparently has an entire cottage industry of goofy Windows shareware applications which for $9-$20 will do this simple task for you. I find that Outpod did the job well. Its free, and does exactly what I wanted.
She had used a Nokia 3650 before getting the ‘Berry and liked it fine. She didn’t like the keyboard much on it though, which is understandable. Rael always called it the Birth Control Keypad phone, which I find apt. But she had been eyeing the P910 a little more closely ever since I got my N90 for the following reasons, which are all viewed to her as upgrades to her BlackBerry:
- Music player, to serve as an auxiliary backup iPod of sorts.
- MP3 ringtones. Duh.
- a Camera
- MMS
- When she deletes an email, it will be deleted in Mail.app when she gets home.
That last one is the big one, if you ask me. While the BlackBerry will deliver email readily to you all day long, it is completely out of sync with what you really have in your Inbox. The P910’s email client is quite good for being stock, it not only supports IMAP but it also supports syncing multiple folders like a real-live IMAP client.
Sure, if you have a BES and use Outlook you’re fine with the BlackBerry because it keeps up with what is going on, but BIS service for the BlackBerry is kind of a laugh when you can get much better results by using the IMAP standard. And her office at Brown University uses Exchange with IMAP turned on so she can get her office email on the P910 as well as her Windows PC at work and her Mac at home. And it will all be in sync. Tada.
It kills me that more people aren’t using IMAP.
So I loaded up a 512MB memory stick with some music she likes, got her contacts on there, and will buy her a Bluetooth adapter so she can finally use iSync. I think I hear her picking out ringtones in the other room as we speak.
As for the BlackBerry, I’ll call T-Mobile and ask them if they can service it. I don’t know if its still even under any sort of warranty. It will live alongside its other stalwart brethren, in a box under my desk for future revisions to BlackBerry Hacks or another project that requires me to have a 7100-series ‘Berry around.