IT Thoughts

Before I got my first blackberry, I hated the idea. Mostly because I hated people with the “blackberry twitch”; ie: that incessant need to check the phone every time it buzzes/dings/etc with a new email message.

When I finally *had* to get my first berry, I determined that I’d do everything in my power to avoid this. I knew I’d still *check* my email frequently, but that’s different than the constant distraction of the Evil Flashing Red Light, the Slightly Sexy Silent Buzzing and Nebulous BlackBerry Twitch.

So here’s what I’ve done to avoid that. It isn’t perfect, but it works for me:

1. Use Gmail, instead of blackberry mail. It’ll stop the buzzing, which is good. It’ll also segregate out your SMS messages from your email, which is hugely useful (SMS still buzzes). 2. Don’t use your blackberry email address for regular mail. Sync everything up through your gmail or main email account. Forget you have a blackberry mail account. 3. EXCEPT, set your mail server (or Gmail) to forward all emails with a subject line of “URGENT” to your blackberry mail account 4. Set your blackberry to go off with a specific ringtone when it receives messages with “urgent” in the subject line 5. If you use Twitter via SMS, use TwitterBerry or a similar client, so messages don’t get lost in your SMS queue.

Basically, use Gmail to keep your data usage down and to stop the buzzing, route urgent emails to your blackberry mail and prioritize it properly, segregate out all non-essential communication (ie: Twitter / Pownce / etc).

This’ll allow you to check mail when YOU want to (which’ll still probably be every 5 minutes, heh), to check your non-essential communiques when YOU want to, get stuff that’s actually urgent right away and not lose your SMS messages (which most blackberry users do).

Twitter is currently down. Has been for awhile. Scheduled maintenance, so this isn’t a big deal. Except that, as Dave Winer recently, scheduled downtime of 6+ hours on a service people rely on for communication isn’t acceptable. Stil, like Dave, there are certain situations in which you need to pause writes to the database, so if Twitter is doing a major architectural update… Well, they won’t have much of a choice here.

So that’s the wrong way to do downtime: long outage for something people rely on to communicate. Hell, if Twitter was up right now I’d normally be twittering this!

But, that said, major, major kudos to the Twitter team for their hourly updates on what’s extending the downtime, visible here at their blog:

Update (12/17 12a): We ran into a minor glitch and will be taking 1 more hour of down-time.  Thank you for your patience!

Update (12/17 3a): We’re slowly bringing services back up.  You’ll probably see some slowness for a while.  We hope to be back up to speed before your finish your bagel and coffee, NYC.

Update (12/17 5a): We’re still working on fixing some issues causing massive slowness site-wide. We’re on it.

Update (12/17 6a): We’re waiting on a fix to our network switch which we’ve determined is causing the slowness we’re seeing.  More soon. 

The updates totally calm folk own. Major lesson for all tech geeks and folk who keep sites up: Yep, when things are down you have to work your ass off to bring’em up. But dropping a quick hourly note out to the folk who use your service will keep them pretty calm and forgiving. Ignorance isn’t bliss ;-)

Ugh… Evidence:

• 27 of 45 Techmeme are about, or in response to the iPhone (yeah, I know I’m not helping)
• All kinds of really important features for a huge number of phone users simply aren’t in the iPhone: Engadget article
• Call quality, and the network, are horrible: Valleywag article
• And, above all, the HYPE is insane… Especially when compared to the huge number of issues with this device at 200$, nevermind 600$

Ask yourself this would you buy the best designed car in the world, at a premium, if it wouldn’t go faster than 40mph?

This is effectively the most expensive phone ever created for the mass market (including AT&T’s plans), and it’s not even a very good phone! You have people trading in phones with better connectivity, better network, better audio, better cameras, more storage, better MP3 players… Just to grab this piece of history.

And make no mistake, for all my hating, it is a piece of history. The web browser alone will revolutionize the mobile device industry. I don’t believe the touchscreen will, but I believe future versions of the iPhone will make up for this. Long, long, long-time readers of this blog will know that I’ve been pushing for a true mobile convergence device for a long time, and the truth is that that iPhone is a huge new step in that direction from a UI and input perspective.

But, for all the things Apple did right, there’s a lot more they could have done. And the fact that they didn’t is what pisses me off. They’ve become complacent and started taking their customer base for granted (again).

Sure, they’ll sell out of this shipment. And the next. And the next. But I won’t be happy with the iPhone until it actually does its 3 primary tasks right: phone, multimedia device and mobile computer.