And Josie seems fine today. [shrug]


Post from mobile portal m.livejournal.com

Hey, happy New Year. I'm not a few days ahead, just getting it out of the way now before I forget.

What was I saying?

ANyway, what a large bunch of typing I did justifying my new phone over my old one in my last post, eh? I'll be surprised if anyone but me reads it. But I have to add one more nail to my Blackberry Storm's coffin: Yet another recent Blackberry outage. It's not funny, but it's hilarious, if you know what I mean. I'm not sure I know, so if you know, let me know, mmkay?

I don't have a wall calendar to take the place of my beloved 2009 Edward Monkton one, but I have a possible candidate in mind. What've you got on your walls?

Yule! Hanukkah (which has too many valid English spellings)! Christmas! And other holidays! w00t! I hope you all are fine and dandy, enjoying time with friends and/or family.

Today, December 27th, has been christened by my daughter as Barfing Day! Yay! We aren't sure what's up, but we're having a great time cleaning! And she's festive as ever. Seriously. It's bizarre and unnatural. The kid horfs up the contents of her entire digestive tract and is laughing the next moment. Hopefully it's just a quickly-over bug.

The big nerdy topic of this missive is that I replaced my Blackberry Storm with a cheaper and somewhat less capable phone to save myself $30 a month and set my wife and I up for possibly commingling our phone plans and saving even more money. I'm able to do just about everything on my new enV TOUCH (hereafter known as "the Touch" sans presumptuous capitalization), sometimes with some workarounds, but my web data and other trackables are all still manageable despite switching from a phone that's built for that kind of thing to one that isn't. That difference just isn't worth $30 a month to me. An overview of the differences between the phones and my interactions with same follows.

The first comparison point I noticed when starting to work with the Touch is the touch interaction. The Storm's touch screen is much easier to use than the Touch's, which is kind of a surprise to me. The Storm's SurePress technology, in other words its decoupling of touch and select functionality, does make a difference in navigating menus, screens, etc. However, the Touch is also somewhat inconsistent about registering a touch and hold, say for a drag maneuver, or just a touch and select. I've gotten the hang of where it selects compared to where my finger is pressing on the screen, but it's still a bit awkward to work with in some situations. The Touch can open up, though, so I can browse using the internal screen and a direction pad/Ok button combination if I want to. That internal screen and attached full QWERTY keyboard make the Touch very much superior to the Storm for data entry and browsing for me. The Touch's touch screen is fantastic for simple things like dialing phone numbers, it's just not so hot for browsing or text entry, though there is a virtual keyboard included.

Also interesting is the inclusion on the Touch of some gesture recognition. I haven't played much with this, but find it very interesting. I can't think of situations where I'd use it over one of the other keyboard options, but I can see its potential for some people. The Touch has a few more of these kinds of features and options that say to me that it's got a more mature underlying OS than the Storm.

Returning to the basic phone interaction, though, one of the most infuriating things about the Storm is its keyboards. Yes, plural. I have an iPod Touch, so I know how a virtual keyboard works and I'm fairly proficient with the iPod's, though still not close to my desktop keyboard. That's to be expected. The Storm's virtual keyboards might be ok if they didn't require using the SurePress technology that makes the whole screen a pressable button.

Let me back up a bit. The Storm has what is both a very cool and very uncool feature in that the screen tracks where a user is pressing it, but no selection normally happens until the screen is pressed. There is an audible and tactile click when this happens, and then the Storm acts like the left mouse button was pressed on a regular PC mouse, doing whatever it's supposed to do. This is fine. But I tend to move my fingers slightly when I pressed on the Storm's screen, which led to what appeared to be terrible typing accuracy, because a different key than what I intended to push would register. I recall someone saying something like users can be accurate or fast on the Storm, but not both. Since the Storm's full QWERTY virtual keyboard in portrait mode has keys smaller than my pinky fingertip, you can see where there might be a problem. When using the Storm's virtual keyboard in landscape mode, the keyboard takes up most of the screen, making it difficult for me to work with for more than a line or two of text. In portrait mode, there is also a shortcut keyboard that puts two keys on each button, relying more on input prediction to figure out which of the two keys the user is pressing, that alleviates the physical accuracy issue fairly well, but the Storm's text prediction is not very good. So with two virtual QWERTY keyboards and one more portrait keyboard relying more on input prediction striking out in various ways, the Storm's input capabilities aren't so hot.

The Touch has a virtual keyboard, gesture recognition, and the holiest of holies for me in the form of an actual physical keyboard. Ah.

The Storm's touch screen stays on when you're on the phone, so if you mash it up against the side of your head for some reason, you're going to "press" a virtual button on the phone. I find that when I bring the Touch up to my ear, the screen darkens and I've never had an accidental press on it. Storm users can get an application (I think they have to pay for it) to act like the Touch. This functionality should be built into any touchscreen phone with an accelerometer. Duh.

The Touch is supposedly slower on web access than the Storm, but the native Blackberry web browser is terribly slow, enough that either Opera Mini or Bolt Browser are among the top downloads for Blackberry units. I don't see much change there, since neither of those two alternate Blackberry browsers worked worth a damn on the Storm for me. I hit up my to-do list and some Google sites fairly regularly throughout the day and the Touch handles them all nicely. Thanks to Google for making their mobile sites so good. Google Voice will even play voicemail over the web to the Touch as if I were calling it, or over the stereo speakers if I have it opened up. Or I could just call Google Voice, so my options are open.

Yes, for the curious, I have an unlimited data plan on the Touch, which includes Mobile Email to access web-based email accounts such as my GMail, but I think I'm just going to uninstall that and use the GMail mobile web site. Verizon wants to charge two bucks a meg or something insane like that for web access, but for ten bucks a month, it's unlimited. For me, expecting to use the web access a lot, that's a no-brainer.

One thing I do miss is that my phone contacts now don't sync up with my Google contacts. Since I don't make that many changes to my phone contacts, and I'll be using the GMail mobile web site to send emails from the phone if I have to, this shouldn't be a big deal. I just have to remember to update manually once in a while. My phone's calendar doesn't sync with GCalendar either, but there's no task list on the Touch to worry about, so hitting my web-based to-do list is fine.

So aside from the email push that Blackberries all have (unless their services are down), the Storm having a superior touch screen (tied to an infuriating input system), and more potential flexibility in the form of applications for the Storm, I ain't missin' nuthin' with my "upgrade", and have added a decent dinner out's worth of cash each month. By the way, thanks to a holiday special at Verizon on the Touch and Gazelle.com being happy to buy my Storm, I'm coming out ahead on the Touch purchase, too. The Storm was a good unit for me for a while, showing me the value of having a smartphone, but I can't justify the monthly cost right now. Don't get me wrong, if someone would pay for my monthly service, I'd snap up a Droid or maybe one of the Blackberries with a physical keyboard, but for at least a while, I'm fine.

I remembered last post's "mystery thought".

When our dogs bark at people who are walking or riding by, we like to think that they're actually cheering the people on, shouting motivational phrases like "You can do it! Go go go! Keep it up! Woooo!" but in canine, so us humans don't understand.

You can't pick your daughter, but you can pick your daughter's nose ... until she's too old for that BS.

I got a hematoma from a blood test yesterday that I'll be sporting for quite a while. Last night, my daughter banged her head while she ran amok! amok! amok!, raising a sizable lump that is nearly gone this morning. She's fine, leaving me jealous of her Wolverine-like regenerative abilities. I'm not old, dammit! Get off the lawn! (That's funnier because we don't have a lawn)

Chickens don't give a damn about mud.

And there's a mystery thought that I can't remember now. If any of you can remember it for me, that'd be great. Get off the lawn!

The scare: A big data breach occurred at RockYou, exposing gobs of user data. 32 million users' data, including logins and passwords. You don't use or know RockYou? Ah, but if you use MySpace or Facebook, you have a very high chance of this affecting you, because RockYou creates apps on both sites, including a very popular greeting card app and a "gift" app, among other things. Still not concerned? The login information that the breach exposed is unencrypted, and it's fairly explicit as to where to use what login information for MySpace, Facebook, etc.

I'm one of the vulnerable, having used the greeting cards app on Facebook for quite a while, so I changed passwords all over the place last night just in case. That led to changing passwords for some of my sites that talk to other sites, too, such as Gmail pulling in my email from other web locations, and changing passwords on my phone. What a PITA this interconnectedness thing can be. Now I don't know my passwords anywhere, but I'll get used to the new ones. It has definitely made me think more about what information I give where.

And the tip: The best base for a home-built mocha is instant Swiss Miss Dark Chocolate Sensation. I had to link to a Consumer Reports hot chocolate comparison when I found it. I had no idea. Anyway, aside from the unfortunate naming (kudos not to be given to the Swiss Miss marketing person/team involved in this product's name), Swiss Miss Dark Chocolate Sensation is great in hot milk. Water doesn't result in the same creaminess, so fuggedaboutit. Drop a shot or two of espresso in the chocolate and forget the world for a few minutes.