I read somewhere a few days ago that pictures and video on the internet don’t do the Motorola Droid justice. Boy, they were right about that. In person, this thing is phenomenal.
After Jiu Jitsu practice this afternoon, I somehow ended up in the Verizon Wireless store in Glastonbury. Don’t ask me how I got there, it was a blur. All I know is that I wanted this new PDA because the screen is much larger than my current Blackberry Curve screen and I can see the browser 100% better. Also, HTML emails show up as HTML, not text with code all over the place. It’s a superb business tool.
I am going to keep this post short because the Motorola Droid has been plastered all over the internet and television for that past few weeks. I am not going to go over all that again, but I will throw a nice little video in this post for you. Let me say this…the phone is awesome. Gmail, Google Calendar and Contacts are seamless. Apps are just a few clicks away. The operating system is extremely intuitive. At first glance, I thought I would actually need the manual to learn how things work. About 15 minutes of playing with the phone gave me a good working knowledge of how to use just about everything.
The Motorola Droid is the best PDA device I have ever touched…hands down.
In my previous post, I think I mentioned that I can delete email on my Blackberry Curve and it would delete on my desktop email account, but not the other way around. Well, after having the phone for a day or two and not deleting email on it (only deleting the mail on my desktop), I am realizing that it actually does delete on the phone, it just takes a while.
Yeah, you don’t have to hit “reconcile” or anything, it does it automatically. This is nice because I really would have a large pile of email sitting on the phone if this wasn’t the case.
Also, I installed the Blackberry Desktop Software that came with the phone. I believe it was version 4.3. It generally worked ok, but did crash at times. I guess that it didn’t work ok then. I would have to undo all of the settings and reset them and then sync again. The crashes would occur at the end of the sync somewhere. Last night, I upgraded to the latest version of the Blackberry Desktop Software, version 4.5, and the phone and desktop synced just fine. There is also a new look to the software. I only synced up once, so I am crossing my fingers that it works without issue from here on in.
Well, I decided to upgrade my old Treo 700w for a nice, new BlackBerry Curve 8330 Smartphone. I thought it was about time to jump on the email-on-your-pda bandwagon. We are planning some activities and vacations this Summer, so this will cover one base.
So, let me tell you about my experience.
I have many email addresses, all forwarding to one Gmail address. It makes life a bit more simple. When I got the phone, I went through the quick setup. After that, I went in and configured an email address. It was basically inputting the email address and password. After that, I logged into Gmail and clicked “settings.” I clicked “Fowarding and POP/IMAP.” There, I enabled POP.
Then, I sent myself an email. Low and behold, I received it in my Gmail account and my Blackberry. Truly, I thought this was amazing. Then, I clicked delete on the Blackberry. I had the option of deleting the message from just the phone or both the phone and the Gmail account. I deleted it from both the phone and the Gmail account. A few seconds later, I noticed it disappear from Gmail. Again, I was stunned.
After that, I did the whole thing again, except this time, I deleted the message from Gmail first. I waited and waited for the message to disappear from the Blackberry. After a little research on the web (and customer support), I found out this is not possible. The messages stay on the Blackberry until they are deleted from there. Why? I have no idea. This is going to be kind of a pain in the butt, but I’ll figure something out. I did a search for “blackberry curve won’t reconcile” and I think I read somewhere that if you are using the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (or something like that), you can reconcile your messages with your email client. Until I find some information, I don’t know how to reconcile the email on the Blackberry with Gmail, or Outlook for that matter.
The other issue I was having was that whenever I would send an email from the Blackberry or from Gmail, I would receive a copy of that email on the Blackberry. I needed to find out how to stop that. I called customer support and, while on hold, did a search for “blackberry getting copies of sent email” on Google. I found a nice website that instructed me to login to the Verizon Wireless Blackberry Internet Service (BIS). No one seems to tell you these things from the company. At this point, customer support picked up and we both created an account and created a filter for my email address. Basically, the filter stops my own email address from sending me email. This forum post will tell you exactly how to do that.
Otherwise, everything is very smooth. The Blackberry syncs up with my Outlook 2007 so I can have my tasks, contact list and calendar on both my PC and the Blackberry. This is not too much different from the Treo 700w.
I’ll let you know how it works on the streets when I have had it for a while.
