Blackberry Bold Road Trip Evaluation
My lady and I gave each other Blackberries for Christmas, specifically the Blackberry Bold. Last week we visited her family in Dawson Creek and the road trip gave me a chance to see what the Blackberry Bold would do in areas where reception was often spotty and sometimes non-existent. Since we have had the phones for about a month now, I thought it was time for an evaluation.
One thing I played around with quite a bit was the video capabilities of this unit. These were simply short videos shot through the windscreen as we went north through the Fraser Canyon. The video above is a longish sample. I was surprised at how good the quality actually is. There's some pixelation of solid backgrounds, but overall it's pretty fair and its dead simple to use.
One of the reasons we got blackberries was that we were texting a lot and the numeric keypads on normal cellphones had gotten to be a pain. Having a full keyboard makes a huge difference. The only quibble I have is that the keys are very small so I wind up typing with my thumbnails. Given the size constraints of the unit there probably isn't any way around this. The iphone is reported to be better because of the larger screen. I presume the Blackberry Storm would be the just as good.
We used the GPS a bit and found that it worked well as long as there was a network to connect to. Apparently the positioning comes from the satellites and the maps are served over the network. It's possible to preload google maps and get the GPS to use them instead, but we haven't tried that ourselves.
One of our main sources of amusement on the trip was checking for various kinds of coverage. Then I saw a twitter post to the effect that roaming data charges were $20/meg and we quickly turned off roaming access to the 3g network. The Blackberries still allowed us to browse and tweet using the EDGE network although they were slower in that mode. We're very nervous about our next bill though.
After a month of using the Blackberry Bold it has become totally integrated into my wirehead lifestyle. Although I'm never far from a computer I'll often pull out the Blackberry for a quick google lookup or to check my tweets. A large screen is still necessarry if you are going to do much browsing, though
Overall, I'm very pleased with the Blackberry Bold. I like having a network capable computer on my belt. I like having the camera and taperecorder all in one unit. My only complaint is that the Blackberry has vast capabilities and the documentation is less than detailed. That's always the case, though, and it just means that only complete dweebs will be able to use their PDAs to their full potential.
One thing I was concerned about is becoming reliant on expensive 3g connectivity. This is definitely something that most people should be careful of. In my case its less of an issue because I'm always close to a wi-fi network and the Blackberry Bold is fully wi-fi capable. Except maybe for those damned roaming charges....
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