Monday, January 31, 2011

New Year… New Challenges

It's a new year for this blog and my only resolution for this year is to attempt to become more diligent about getting posts together. It's not a matter of time, because right now I have plenty of that. It's my motivation that's lacking. I have good ideas and I make sure to keep them written down, I just don't act on them and that is something I need to change if I'm going to be successful (here and in life).

Walk like an Egyptian… Just no talking.

This past Friday, the Egyptian government cut off cell phones and internet access in response to the mass protests developing around the country. Stock markets and government services were exempt from the outage. I hope great big alarms went off around the world. A country with this much disregard for rights of any kind should be censured.

Hopefully, this will alert the world community that we need some kind of universal law regarding communications. Emergency communication still needs to be available and there is no assurance that it is available in situations such as this. When governments are allowed to cutoff essential services to citizens regardless of their politics, they violate the principles that allow them to govern.

Android… It's like a virus and now I have it.

Don't get me wrong, I like the Android OS. I liked my BlackBerry better, but unfortunately, BestBuy doesn't carry them anymore and my screen cracked. I could have replaced it with a Curve, but the keys are so small, I spent most of my time correcting what I mis-typed.

I chose the HTC Incredible and I really like the phone. There are some things that both take getting used to and offer less integrated functionality than I wanted. The unified inbox is one thing that I really needed. I monitor 3 email accounts regularly and switching between inboxes is a real pain. I finally did find "Improved Email" which offers most of what I need.

I don't know about other carriers, but one thing I (and many others) find annoying is the stuff that Verizon loads on the phone and you can't get rid of. Things like 'City ID' which displays the city that the caller was from after the call is over. That is useless to me and it can't be deleted. Other annoyances are the three different 'Social Streaming' apps that they included. Each has the same functions with a different UI. What they don't include is a good synchronization application that works like the BlackBerry sync app. HTC has an application but it's very limited.

All in all, the android phones are excellent and provide a good alternative to the iPhone. My contract is up this summer and all of the kinks should be ironed out of the Verizon iPhone, so maybe I'll try that next.