1000 Times 1000

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A lot of things have been said about the iPhone, but only when you’ve had it in your hand, played with its features, made some phone calls and have send emails you can say:

“I have seen the future of mobile communication: it’s the iPhone!”

I had an appointment with George Lebrun (serial entrepreneur, screenwriter, social media guru) and he brought his iPhone. I ‘lend’ it for a day. While ordering Coffee already six people gathered around me with open mouths whispering “he has an iPhone!”. It is not only very well designed (as we may expect from Apple) it is also very intuitive, which means as much as that you don’t need to read the instructions, because everything is just the way you would expect it to be.

At the end of the day I had to give it back and grabbed my Blackberry Pearl to save George his contact data, it felt like I had been warped back into time 10 years with my Nokia 6150 (my first phone) in my hand.

No discussion whatsoever, my next phone is designed in California and fabricated in China.

A half year ago I had the honor to meet Walt Mossberg. I knew he was a very influential journalist, but now I know he’s more than that! He’s probably the most influential technology journalist in the world. He is the first one to give a full review of the iPhone.

Check it out:

Normally I do not like to whine about products or services, but in this case I do not have a choice. 2 years ago I bought the Palm Treo 650, it was new, you could check your mail with it and it had a camera! It was at no charge with a 2 year subscription, so I pretty nice deal I would say….

In the beginning it was an OK phone, I had little problems (accept with calling, synchronizing, emailing and all other stuff you do with a phone), but that is also something you have to take into account if you buy the newest products. It is a known thing for innovators to buy stuff that is very cool and on the edge, but doesn’t work that well yet (kind of a beta phase of the product).

Now after 2 years of miserable communication I would like to share my experience with you, so that you would never make the same mistake I did.

5.2 reasons why you should never buy a Palm Treo (and if it is up to me this accounts to all Palm products)
1. synchronization with Mac s#cks. If you buy a Palm, you buy it because you can synchronize your computer (contacts, email and calendar) with your phone. Palm said it was compatible with Mac which was true, if you use Palm Contacts and Palm Calendar (which are probably the worst designed software programs ever made) in stead of Addressbook and iCal (which every Mac user uses). So I had to buy a 40 dollar program to fix the synchronization. That worked for about half a year, then my Treo crashed (with capital C) and I never got it working again.
2. battery time! It lasts for 1 day, I mean… 16 hours. If you do not charge it overnight the battery will die! So my phone was more out of battery than that it did what it had to do.
3. too much software. On the Treo you can open word, excel, and powerpoint documents. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING!!! That I would like to check my excel sheet on a 2.5 inch screen? Ok, you can say, hey if you don’t want to use it you don’t have to, but I believe it is because of the effort they put into making the Treo Word, excel, etc. compatible they forgot to put time in building a stable operating system. It crashes if you put it down on a table without using your soft touch. It crashed once saying: “Not enough memory to fulfill this task”, well you should think that erasing some stuff would help right? Wrong: “Not enough memory to fulfill this task”!!!!
4. alarm. I wonder what the development team was thinking when they had that 10 hour meeting about what to do with the alarm… On a Treo they have 2 sound options; On or Off. Normally when I go to sleep I turn off the sound, but IF you want to wake up in the morning it has to make noise, right? Not possible with a Palm. “if one wants the sound off then he probably doesn’t want to be disturbed, so no alarm bells either” that must have been their logic. Donkeys! (this in combination with the battery has costs me a lot off appointments).
5. screen lights up at every thing it does… I checked my email with the Treo and then I deleted an account and entered a new one, this was a little bit to difficult for the Palm to understand. It kept trying to check my deleted email account for 18 months every 6 minutes! This resulted in an annoying beep and (if you’d turn off the volume) the screen lighted up every time. Very annoying if your with other people, because they thing your phone is receiving something.
5.5 5.1 you have to pay for (miserable) support. Do you have a problem with your Palm…. You can call for support, the only thing is that you’ll have to pay around a euro per minute for…. yeah for what exactly.. well let’s put it this way, much further then “try a reset” they won’t go.
5.6 5.2 Doesn’t it say enough if you have a troubleshoot website with over 2000 entries!!! So you build a phone and over 2000 different things do not work properly or aren’t intuitive at all. The CEO must have thought “oohh, only a couple of thousand bugs, ship it! We need the revenues”

I guess I can go on for a couple of hours, but I decided not to waste any more time on this lousy product. I’m glad it fell into the Prinsengracht (one of the canals in Amsterdam).

Looking forward to my Blackberry Pearl!

Well, lets put it this way: Top 5 gadgets I need to have (as I’m having a hard time to tell you what to buy)! So in 2007 I need to save a lot of money to fulfill my gadget needs.

Stop the presses!!!!!! at the Macworld Keynote in San Francisco, Steve Jobs announced some very hot new gadgets! There is only ONE Gadget YOU need to have:
From Macworld:
- 3 revolutionary products introduced today:
1. widescreen iPod
2. Internet communicator
3. Mobile Phone

AND they are not 3 different devices! It’s ONE; THE ONE

Its called the iPhone

Who needs a stylus! use your fingers!

Everything compared to the iPone is just a footnote…..

There we go:
Number 1. No doubt about it is the Blackberry Pearl. Right now I have a Treo 650 with crashing software, poor synchronization (let me rephrase that: No synchronization) a battery time of less then a day, lousy interface and usability and I can go on for a while. The Blackberry Pearl is THE email and photo phone I need to have with all features I need: great email handling, great synchronization, long lasting battery time, photo camera oh and don’t forget it fits my style :).
Everyday, I hope someone grabs my Treo and smashed it into the ground (or throw it in the Amstel river) and replaces it with a Pearl! (Yes you can film it and publish it on YouTube)
Price: 399 euros

Number 2. I’d like to do some entrepreneurial podcasts this year, so I need to have an audio recording device. According to my acquaintance Neville Hobson the M-Audio Microtrack 24/96 is the best device out there for recording podcasts.
Price: 499 dollars (Oops… I have to save more and drink less coffee, I guess…)

Number 3. A pocket beamer! Not only to give presentations, but also to watch a movie in bed or to watch an important soccer game with friends. The Samsung SP-P300ME is very stylish, but also pretty expensive. There seem to be only a couple pocket beamers out on the market and the quality of the light isn’t that impressive (that will be a matter of time though). So my choice is still the samsung (it fits neatly with my mac :) ).
Price: 550 euros

Number 4. Wifi Voip phone. There are a lot of new phones coming to the market with wireless voip connections and build in skype software. I haven’t figured out yet what the best phone is to buy when you’re having a Mac, but the BCM WLAN800 seems to me the best choice, because it supports multiple protocals (Skype, but also SIP and MSN Talk). The Netgear and Belkin Skype phones are most popular, but they both have a lot of negative reviews.
I only have a mobile phone and I believe a lot of people threw away their landlines. But I think we will go back to landlines, but then with a local SkypeIn number (or from another provider) that is attached to our wifi phone at home. Basically this means you have a local number (at about 25 euros a year) where you can receive inbound calls and for outgoing calls you’ll pay internet prices (between zero and up to 10 cents a minute for international calls). Probably your better of waiting a while for the next generation wifi enabled voip phones, but if your an innovator, you got to have one, right?
(minor detail: Skype doesn’t sell Dutch local numbers yet…)

Price: No idea, nobody seem to sell it :( , but probably around 200 euros.

Number 5. The Wii.

need I say more…. (I’m not a gamer, but this one is so hot it cannot not be included in this list)
Price: Does it matter? ok, 250 euros (In Europe we always pay a kind of a premium… it’s less than 250 dollars in the US)