blackberry

I've been doing most of my personal writing on the blackberry device I obtained recently. It's a novelty thing. Writing on the keyboard is of course much more faster and efficient, not to mention accurate. I've looked through some of my posts and tweets from the first time I've used the blackberry and as expected they were riddled with typos and unsightly mistakes I would normally be able to avoid if I had been using a proper full sized keyboard. However, for someone who moves around all day being able to type in comments and posts on the move with a fully featured keypad (instead of the t9 predictive input system) is a real godsend. Most of the things I've posted using the blackberry were either written while I was outside waiting for something or inside cuddled up in a bed waiting to fall asleep. Both the types of situation that carrying around a full sized laptop would have been rather inconvenient. I've also been able to read and sometimes do a quick fix on various ppt graphics and documents I would be needing in my lab projects, and I'm looking for ways to integrate some sort of mobile mathematical simulation suite to the blackberry device so I can do some serious work on the device without having to sit in front of the desk. Of course, considering the limited hardware of the device being able to replace my trusty laptop is a mere pipe dream at the moment, but who knows. Being able to do decent work on anything less than a full workstation was a pipe dream a few years ago. I can still remember the days when mobile laptops weighed around 7 or 8 pounds. That was the first Apple powerbook I had I think. Modern laptops of relatively larger and heavier frames weigh around 4 or 5 pounds. There are heavier laptops around but you are not supposed to lug those things around in the first place.

Will mobiles be able to replace most of the laptop functions we know and use today? I believe so. The nokia n85 I had before could connect to a TV screen and use it as a monitor, while interfacing with a bluetooth keyboard, so we are really close to making such technology reality. There are a lot of naysayers to the mobile technology as well, but those people tend to be either 1)doesn't really use computers enough to make a distinction between a laptop and a desktop, they might as well work with pentium from 2000, 2)doesn't move around in the first place, so it's either sitting at home with a cellphone or sitting at home with a desktop, the choice would be obvious to them. Ubiquitous computing where the device is divided into mobile interface and centralized processor/server cluster is coming whether you like it or not.

Unlike my old nokia however, the blackberry only runs on the EDGE 2.5 generation network. In this age where 4.0 generation networks are already being implemented in limited locations (guess where they are. Hint: they are somewhere in the Asia) this is a crime. The 2.5 generation networks are only slightly faster than the dialups of the old, and we all have a pretty good idea of the atrocious speed on those things. the funny things is this is the network the At&t was rumored to plan to keep as a major network channel until the 2010 (instead of rolling out 3G), under the very typical American idea that the neglected and outdated stuff are still good enough for the unwashed masses of the American public to consume... Those same guys are saying that the financial meltdown is the fault of the people who took the mortgages by the way, instead of the banks who approved them after month long review processes during which they really didn't review anything.