The Pnebleu Blog

So I just installed WordPress for Android; it took about one minute to install both this self-host blog and my WordPress.com hosted blog.  Since I bought my Motorola Xoom I’ve been having a blast with Android.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure how much I’d use a tablet, but now that I have one I use it more than my phone.  For me, the 10 inch screen is just about right and I definitely like it being widescreen rather than 4:3.  I like having the 3G, soon to be 4G.  I just bought the car charger and I’m anticipating the next opportunity to use the tablet as a GPS.

The Android platform has so much potential even with its weaknesses.  If they could component-ize and make available on the Market every part of the OS, Google would be able to get around the update issues caused by the manufacturers and mobile carriers (customized UI, additional apps, etc).  Then the user of the phone would be able to swap out the Samsung TouchWiz interface or HTC Sense camera app for the stock Android interface and application.  Users could also easily upgrade most parts of the phone (keyboard, UI, apps) even if they were on an older OS version.

I think the Market is Android’s greatest strength, but it has plenty of room to improve.  The ability to create lists of  installed apps and easily separate them by device would be wonderful for me.  I have the Xoom and I have the Samsung Galaxy S Captivate.  Each has different sets of applications installed with some apps overlapping on both devices.  The Market is great at keeping track of my purchased apps, but it didn’t remember my free apps when I installed a new ROM on my phone.  On the bright side, having single marketplace to install apps on phones and tablets from many different vendors with a few clicks of the mouse on a browser is a really powerful advantage.  I think we’re going to have a long future with the Android OS.

So, I’ve had the BlackBerry Bold for a couple weeks now.  I’ve gotten quite accustom to using it regularly.  Actually, some of this is typed with it.

First off, as a phone it works much better than my old one.  I can get the volume loud enough to hear well when I’m driving.  It allows me to keep all the phone numbers and email addresses I need for people.

As an Internet-device, it suits my purposes very well.  The browser on this model phone reduces websites to fit on the whole screen, then you zoom in to see what you want.  Also, some sites have mobile pages and the zoom feature automatically turns off for those because they are already the right size.  I have almost completely moved to the BlackBerry for my email needs.  The qwerty keyboard has is it’s greatest feature in my book.

Finally, as an application platform it has a good start, but there is room for improvement.  The BlackBerry App World store has many applications, but not nearly as many as the iTunes App Store.  It also is hard to navigate on the phone.  There is no way to browse the store on the PC, which is a really bad idea.  I want to be able to easily buy apps from my computer, because it is easy to use for this.

Overall, I am very happy with this phone.  It’s not perfect, but it is so much better than what I had before.

It is finally here for me!  I got my Blackberry Bold yesterday evening.  In the next couple of days I will updated this post with info about my experience.