BTW: I am out on vacation (holiday for most of the non-US world) ... working ... iphone ... yadda yadda

Spent several days in Orlando Florida (the house of mouse), and today drove to Key West, after a short stop in Miami to visit a friend, his wife, and their newly 1 year old daughter. Of course, upon getting to Key West, first our hotel door wouldn’t open, and then when we figured out the trick with the help of the hotel person, we inserted our card into the door, and the lights went out on the Island. Ok, this is mildly amusing. No … really. I have a con call in an hour and a half with some partners, and my daily support call with a particular customer. Then a proposal due at 2pm tomorrow, as well as several due over the next 2 weeks that I am working on. Vacation? Yeah, its a lighter workload. :) If I can take reasonable pictures, I will. For any potential customers here on the Island, give me a ring on the cell so I can argue that this really was a business trip :)

I’ll be back in a week from today. We drove down from Michigan (yeah, you can cringe … we took it easy and did it over 2.5 days). The snow that socked Dallas chased us out of Atlanta. We were in northern Florida with large wet snowflakes hitting our windshield. I felt bad for our acquaintances who were to join us for a day at the house of mouse … who flew. Stuck in Atlanta for many hours. Fear not, on our way back in, we will be running into many snowflakes. While I am at it, I should point out that Verizon’s USB broadband connection is AWESOME. While my wife was driving and I was on a call with a customer, I had a nice set of windows open looking at their machines. I am less than impressed with the iPhone, it has some nice tools (iSSH is great), but as a phone it is pales in comparison with Blackberry units. And worse, its email app is about one stage above a toy application. I need a phone that just works, all the time. Email has to work all the time. Browsers have to work, all the time. They get a 1 out of 3 in my book. I have time to wait to see how Google’s Nexus pans out. The “Droid” from Verizon had a crappy keyboard, and I need to type. iPhone I can type on, though it is awkward sometimes. One of my favorite annoyances with iPhone has been the utter lack of ability to position a cursor within a word I want to change on email/text application. I can go to the beginning or the end. But not the middle. So I have to retype an entire word, rather than change one character. Another is its email sorting, and mail push. I want to read emails in the order I receive them. I do not want the date used in any part of the sorting algorithm. Because mailers lie. Their dates are wrong, and for the most part, you can ignore them. Maybe Apple isn’t quite aware of this. Mail push is another winner. After spending the money on the blackberry, I went to a web site, entered in the account information, and off it went. It just worked. I didn’t have to set up a new account. I didn’t need to pay additional money for a basic feature like this. When I had the Palm, it just worked, no issues. I had to manually fetch, but it ordered messages correctly. iPhone? Heck no. I am seriously reviewing whats out there. Apple would need to seriously update lots of its software, enable mail push from standard imap accounts, fix its annoying bugs … for me to consider staying with them. I should point out that I’ve been impacted by the 3G->edge dropped call issues as well. I can turn the 3G phone into a 2G device and get better service (but not perfect). Or I can leave it plugged in during the calls and it won’t for the most part, drop the calls. I suspect the dropped calls on iPhone have to do with a software bug that likely does some sort of chip reset or power state change between networks. When the unit is plugged in as in charging, there is sufficient power to keep the signal, so we don’t drop. When the unit is removed from the plug, the transition draws enough power to knock the connection down. Try it and see if this works for you.