Devinator

I have to warn you now, that this blog has little-to-nothing to do with how Aerohive is putting the smack down in the Wi-Fi industry. :)  If you have spare time to read my misc (because I don’t know how to spell the whole word) ramblings on Smartphone transition, and/or have ever had an iPhone or a Blackberry, this blog is for you.  Or maybe it isn’t.

So I’m a big fan of Blackberries.  I’ve had them since…well…the VERY beginning.  My boss at BellSouth handed me one, and said, “use it.”  Oh dear…an electronic leash.  That was the original Blackberry with widely-spaced keys and no voice.  I LOVED that thing…as did my wife.  She was an instant convert (from nothing to Blackberry).  Then the Blackberry phone came along, and wham…I upgraded…and so did she.  Since then there’s been little spurts where we thought we could live without a Blackberry, but they were short-lived at best.

I even bought an iPhone 3G once, and after 1 month, tossed it to my 16-year old daughter (that was over 2 years ago) as a freebie, and promptly switched back to a Blackberry.  It’s been an addiction.  I’m like “Quick-draw McGraw” with a Blackberry…typing faster than a Spaniard talks.  BTW, that’s not a racial slur…they really do talk FAST.  I’ve been to Spain, where I wasn’t allowed to tell jokes and had to say Wee-Fee instead of Wi-Fi…but I digress.

So, I bought an iPhone4 in order to do compatibility testing, throughput testing, feature testing, yada, yada, ya.  After I got it, it just sat there, with a longing look on its face, whispering, “use me…use me.”  I finally succumbed, and starting tinkering with it.  Suddenly, I decided that it’s just like a mini version of my iPad, which I love.  I know what you’re thinking, and no, the iPad isn’t a big version of the iPhone4.  It’s the other way around, or at least that’s how I justify what just happened: I switched…lock, stock, and barrel.  Hooooooooly crap batman, what an experience that was.

First, there was figuring out how to back up my contacts.  Good grief, what a nightmare.  The desktop utility will back it up, but restoring that data onto another device - even another Blackberry - is a PITA.  Ugh.  I finally found an app called ABC Amber Blackberry Converter (what an odd name, eh?) to open the .ipd file (the backup file) so that I could export my contacts out of it to .csv.  OK, step one down…for the small price of $20.  Oy vey.  Then I had to open that .csv file in Excel, move, shift, and manipulate all that data because the formatting was a little wonky.  Then, in order to get that data onto an iPhone, I had to do the dumbest things!  I had to go to Outlook, import that .csv file, match fields (a total PITA), then go into iTunes and tell it to sync contacts with Outlook.  That process took hours to figure out and execute.  SOMEBODY KILL ME!  It actually worked, and then it was pretty easy to move my pictures and music off the phone through Windows Explorer.  That’s as simple as enabling the flash card on the Blackberry as mass storage (a setting) and plugging it into the USB port on my PC.  The card comes up as a drive letter and you can copy/paste stuff.

Second…(yes, all that stuff above was “First”)…

Second, I had to go to the AT&T store, have them put a new SIM in the iPhone (because I bought it under my wife’s account because her account was eligible for an upgrade and the original iPhone SIM was automatically deactivated during the convert-and-convert-back process we went through to get the iPhone working).  Ugh.  Then they had to change my account stuff (e.g. Blackberry Enterprise > iPhone Enterprise) and activate my iPhone.  This is where things got interesting (in a bad way).  I call it the Smartphone Ripple Fffect.  I upgraded…and you know what that means: my wife gets my newer-than-hers Blackberry.  Oh, and it doesn’t stop there.  Oh hell no.  Now the wife is suggesting that once I get her converted from the Blackberry 9000 to the 9700, then we take the TWO 9000 units and have them configured for our 11 year olds (yes, I know, I know) so that they can do texting and be on a family plan with her.  KILL ME!  That’s 2 days of work…and sleepless nghts.

So, the Ripple Effect started almost immediately.  After a couple of hours, I found the COOLEST app EVER called mIQ at MIQLIVE.com.  Holy crapola this is a cool app/service.  Install, login, sync, done…free.  And it WORKS GREAT…and…it’s also the reason I didn’t get any sleep for the 2nd straight night.  So it took about 2 hours to clean out all of my stuff from my 9700, and to reconfigure it for my wife.  Then I moved her music and pictures over.  No biggy.  mIQ took care of the contact sync’ing, and I was pretty much done, or so I thought.  At 2am, I decided to clean off my wife’s 9000, and to put it away for a day or two, to recover from the Ripple Effect, and as I was walking up the stairs deleting contacts off her phone, as fast as possible…I thought to myself, “I wonder if…oh CRAP!…the other phone is set on automatic sync!”  Yep, as I was deleting it off of one phone, the service was deleting it off of the other phone.  Oh yes, I had a backup…from an app that failed to restore the data, had everything in a weirdly-formatted text file, and that couldn’t be converted to any useable format.  Yep, now I have to type all of her contact info back in manually.  There’s over 100 of them.  I SUCK!

When I awoke this morning, after 5 hours of sleep, my wife was leaning over me saying, “my phone won’t send emails.” ARGH!  After 30 minutes, I figured out that it still had all of that Blackberry Enterprise crap on it, and that I had to delete “service books” (whatever the hell those are) to get it to start using the right account to send her emails on.  When she started talking about cleaning off and setting up TWO Blackberry 9000 units for my twins, I just collapsed and went back to sleep.  The Ripple Effect had beaten me down enough for one day.

I’m sure you can imagine what has to be done to get these two phones on a family plan, texting, apps added and configured (even though Blackberry App World doesn’t work over the Wi-Fi connection for some reason), and all the rest.  Perhaps I need to hire a family phone administrator on a contract basis. :)

On another note, my Blackberry had never worked very well with AT&T’s 3G Microcell, but the iPhone4 works perfectly thus far with it.  That’s pretty exciting for me, but my wife remains unhappy about it (with her new-ish 9700 in-hand).  I have to say that the iPhone4 is clearly easier to administer/figure-out than the Blackberry, but I’m still worried about email handling.  I’m more like “Slower-than-Mollasses McGraw” now, so wish me luck. :)  Oh, and just to add insult to injury, the Blackberry Torch was just announced.  Oh that’s just perfect.