Blackberry Blues

There was a time when I did not carry or even own an appointment calendar. Any contacts I wanted to keep were simply written down on a piece of paper. Of course, then life was simpler too. I was in college and other than family, friends and school there wasn’t anyone else in my world.

My first Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) was Palm Zire and I don’t remember why I bought it. My guess would be that after marriage and kids life got a little more complex – doctor’s appointments, school dates etc and there was no way I could carry all that around in my head. Paper seemed too retro, so electronic it was. I liked my Palm Zire, it was only Black-and-White, but did the job. One of the best things I liked about it was the 2 way sync with the Palm’s Desktop Manager. Since the syncing was with software developed by Palm themselves, it was quite smooth. No duplicates. Best of all, I could enter major information, use cut and paste on the desktop and just update my handheld, instead of slowly entering with a stylus.

After a while, I thought to get myself upgraded and got Palm Life Drive. I was already a fan of Palm, so decided to simply go with them. I have to say, I didn’t spend any time researching other than to go to the store and check out their Palm products and choose one of them. Why Life Drive you ask?

First, it was Palm. Second, it was now colored. So I could have a different color of each of us in the family and I managed all our appointments. By now our contact lists had also grown. The simple fact that my husband and I merged our contacts, and then add on various jobs, internships and friendships along the way, and our contact list was growing too. My original paper system may have continued to work, but when I could have it all in my fingertips why not.

Third, it still synched with a Palm Desktop Manager. And what’s more transferring all my information from the Zire to the Life Drive was a snap. A fourth cool thing about the Life Drive was that you could actually use your stylus and write notes as you would on paper.
The Life Drive came with a huge memory capacity and I thought it might be nice to use as a backup device too. And it worked great.

The down side to the Life Drive was that it was a chunky thing to carry around, and the mode of entry using stylus had changed. So I didn’t even bother to learn the new stylus entry system and simply used the keyboard on the PDA to enter data.

But then sometime last year, my computer crashed. After I had it fixed, I tried synching my Life Drive and nothing. I took it in to the Geeks and they didn’t have any answer. Then I learnt that Palm would no longer support the Desktop Manager programs. The drop deadline was sometime February of this month. So I thought it might be time to look for something else in the market. If the Life Drive wasn’t going to be functional, then I needed something else.

So off to the store I went. I learnt that nobody makes simple old PDAs anymore. Everything is a Smart Phone - an oxymoron if I ever heard one. Well that threw a wrench in my plans. I wanted to stay with Palm if possible. But if I had to combine it with a phone, I wanted to stay with Verizon. Palm had just introduced the Palm Pre with AT&T. But I gave priority to the phone company. Now I wonder why, considering the fact that I have the smallest calling plan on my phone and it works just fine for me. So obviously I am not using my phone a lot.

After a very brief consideration, the choices were iPhone or Blackberry according to my Facebook poll. Don’t get me wrong, I love Apple products and I think they work great together. It’s when you mix the Apple and PC worlds I feel things go wrong. But this is from experience several years ago. For all I know things are markedly different now.

As you can probably tell, this is leading to the Blackberry. I figured, it has been around a long time and they know what they are doing. Blackberry was one of the first names I recall hearing things like “I can’t live without my Blackberry.” “People who have Blackberry’s just love them.”
So again without any further ado, I purchased a Blackberry Storm 2. I was eligible to get a phone upgrade from Verizon and yet, I paid for the phone. The sales agent told me I will get a rebate in the mail. Nope, didn’t happen. So now I have a phone that I paid for. Who does that anymore?

Now begins the great adventure. First, we had to find a way to transfer data to the Blackberry. Turns out if I used MS Outlook, this would be a snap. Now MS Outlook is only available with the Professional Version of Office and is quite expensive. So obviously Blackberry was not meant for the Mom market. Then it turned out if I used a Google calendar I could sync it to my Blackberry. But I could not transfer from my Palm to Google calendar. So I just decided to simply start using Google calendar going forward and synch with my Blackberry. The Google calendar itself is quite sophisticated and allowed me the same color coordinated entries as Palm did. Unfortunately when it synchs with the Blackberry, everything is black.

This was the easy part. Let go of the past and look forward regarding appointments. What to do with the contacts? Again, apparently it would sync great with MS Outlook. I can’t say because I never went that route. Blackberry claims they can synch with the Google contacts. But if you look at the data entry modes in the Blackberry and Google contacts they do not match, so if you synch with Google contacts, it shows up as one continuous line of information on the Blackberry. But that wasn’t even a problem yet. I simply did not keep contacts on Google, except to save email addresses. It was not my address book.

I tried to do some research. I am sorry I won’t be able to tell you the whole miserable experience, but just let me say, I had to export files from my Palm in a certain format, go to Yahoo and convert them to another format and then try to import them into the Blackberry. Didn’t work. So I took my Blackberry back to the agent and asked for his help. He had this neat device where he could copy from one of those files from Yahoo or whatever and transfer them onto my Blackberry. It worked. Sort of.

So now I had a bunch of contacts on my Blackberry, most of the information was intact, but it was in a mess. For example, the address would show up as one long line – 800 Washington St,New York,NY. Considering we have a lot of international contacts and some of those addresses appeared thus – 14 International St,near tall pillar,behind well,City,Country,Zip.
But I was not ready to give up hope. I figured I had reached as far as I could with the trying to upload data business. So I went through each contact and painfully corrected each one. The frustrating part was that some of these contacts would randomly return to their original mess. Finally, I would simply delete that record and create a new one. That seemed to work better.
Since I had to take care of synching etc, I downloaded Google Sync for Mobile and synced stuff. Voila my calendar appeared albeit all black text. But then I realized that my contacts were messed up again. Why, because it had downloaded every single email from my Google account as contact and managed to mess up several of my other contacts.

Well this was the learning part, so I don’t mind so much. I realized I could go in and choose not to synch my contacts with anything, just synch the calendar. This worked quite well for sometime. Until one day, I turned on the phone and it said, would you like to upgrade to system whatever. I said yes. It went through its song and dance and when all was done, my calendar looked fine, but my contacts were a disaster. Now I had multiple entries for several people. Now I can understand if Mary Smith is copied from my Facebook contact, Gmail contact, etc. But why duplicate even the ones I already had on the phone. So now I could have as many as 6 Marys. Mary, Mary Smith (only email address), Mary Smith (all contact), Mary Smith (again). How do I know it copied its own self too?

See the wonderful thing about Palm contacts was that you could create categories, and I am not sure how executives do it, but as a Mom, my people categories were simple. Family, Friends, Neighbors, Work, Doctor, etc. You get the point. Well in the Blackberry too you could create categories, but if you created Home and selected Mary Smith, it would ask which phone number do you want to add. It would not include the whole information. Basically, I had to divide Mary Smith into Home, Work, etc. Who operates like that? Even in the business world, I would imagine if you know someone and have their contact information, both personal and professional, you are likely to categorize them in the category you are most likely to look for them. If they are personal friends, maybe FRIENDS works and if you need to call them at work, you just look up your friend’s work number. If they are business contacts, maybe BUSINESS works. But wouldn’t you want to have all of Mary Smith’s information in that one category you went to? And the whole point of categories is to break down your contacts into manageable lists. For example, if I am looking my doctor’s number, if I simply chose the category DOCTOR, there it would be within just a handful of names. At least, that is how Palm did it.

So I soon realized that categories in Blackberry are a dud. If I am wrong, please tell me. But now I had this long list of people in my contact list. And no matter how many contacts you have in your list, you don’t use more than a dozen on a regular basis. It was a pain to scroll through so many names. So the top 10 names became A Mary Smith, A John Doe. You get the idea, since they now started with A they would jump to the top of the list and voila no more scrolling, there they were in the screen.

Now going back to my story about duplicating records, I knew it duplicated my own records because I had 2 A Mary Smith, 2 A John Doe, etc. But I wondered why did this happen anyway, just because I upgraded the software on the phone.
Turns out that upgrading reverts all the settings to some default and it synched calendar and contacts (from various sources such as Facebook, email accounts and apparently itself). So I had to go back and deselect the option to synch contacts yet again. And once again I had to scroll through the contact list and delete the duplicates and unwanted contacts. This took me a whole hour. Since I had already done this once before, you can imagine I was not pleased.

How long have I had the phone? Barely 6 months and in this time, I had trouble finding a smooth way to transfer data from Palm to Blackberry. Now Blackberry has its own Desktop Manager. But all this does is let you use your Blackberry phone as a USB drive and copy files into it – the obsession seems to be media files. And create backup files of the data on your phone. Which I can see will be useful, if I need to reinstall that in my phone or a new phone sometime. But there is no desktop program where I can view what is on my Smart Phone. So any information I enter is typed in awkwardly and without copy and paste, is quite slow going. Now I know people text a lot these days and probably find this funny. But I do not text. I prefer a voice at the end of my phone or an email.

It is nice to be able to check my email and Facebook accounts on my Blackberry. But really they weren’t essential to my being. What I really wanted was a reliable phone, color coordinated calendar and contact list. I have the phone part, but the rest is sadly lacking.

Now I hear Palm has released a phone with Verizon and they do not have a Desktop Manager for it and suggest using Google calendar too. However, there are 3rd party software that will synch Palm to a Desktop Manager similar to the one Palm had or to Palm’s own Desktop Manager. Or so they claim. I am waiting to hear more on that. As an aside, did you hear they had a phone contest and the Palm Pre won - http://blog.laptopmag.com/march-smart-phone-madness-game-13-palm-pre-plus-vs-htc-hd2

Another feature I have not been able to understand is the Silent mode. When I chose my phone to be silent, not vibrate, not low, but SILENT, it won’t ring if I get a call, but every time a Facebook or email pops in, it beeps. Silence means silence, not beep sometimes.

Then the phone comes loaded with all these features, which just seem so redundant. Different programs seem to do the same thing. I am sure people have their favorites and don’t use all of them. Wouldn’t it make sense to only get the ones you use and make them work well rather than have a dozen programs that work somewhat inadequately.

Take voice activation, the button is on the side, very convenient. All you have to do is say, call Mary and voila. Now I will admit I may have a slight accent, but not enough to stump the phone. So I say, call Mary, it asks do you mean John? Whaaa? Oh, and I have even asked my born and bred American friends to try it, same results. Meanwhile, my husband has a Droid and the voice feature on it works just fine when we talk into it. So it is not my accent, it is the program.

I like that I can record a voice memo, I am sorry to lose the ability to scribble a note (no stylus).

As a first time owner of a Blackberry Smart Phone, I must say I am not impressed.