Dailydave: Funny story.

[dave <dave () immunitysec com>]

So a sat night at this bachelors party I went to I pissed off Lynn, a 
dominatrix by saying, "I just don't buy this dominatrix thing. It 
requires too much suspension of disbelief." She'd hit me a few times 
with a leather strap or something. It was funny. At the time I was too 
drunk to even feel it - and too drunk to know the difference between 
honesty and rudeness, which is a very fine line it turns out. Of course 
now, two days later, my ass is killing me and I move like an old man.
On the way home from that event I left my phone in the cab. My phone, at 
the time, was a T-Mobile sidekick 
http://www.t-mobile.com/business/products/product_list.asp?class=pda
The sidekick was great. It had a fantastic interface, and hacker chique 
(sp?). The calculator has "31337" as its image. Anyways, I lost the damn 
thing, which pissed me off. So I decided to go get another phone, and 
picked the Blackberry 7230. They were pushing them hard in the store, 
and I liked the idea of a phone that would work internationally 
(tri-band GSM), and would have better reception, the sidekick's one weak 
point.
If you, or someone you know, is considering doing so - don't. The 
blackberry, at 380 bucks, is a horrible little device. It does have a 
better phone, this is true. Sound is crisp and clear. However, the data 
services on it are worthless compared to the sidekick. The interface is 
entirely driven by the little thumb wheel, which is great if you only 
have 2 fingers, but a modern human has up to ten, and we don't want our 
interface restricted like that. RIM is way to big for what it delivers. 
There was one point, I admit, when it was ok to tag every email I sent 
to people with "This email was sent from a wireless blackberry!" but 
that time was 1990. Not that I'd be sending much email - the keyboard is 
missing any level of usability (esp. compared to the sidekick) and their 
mail application only hooks up to their own mail server. I'm not 
installing exchange or lotus (?!?) and then buying a special server just 
to have mail delivered to me. The sidekick supports SSL/IMAP. See - 
standards. They're there to help! There's just no excuse for the 
Blackberry's piss poor email application. The Sidekick comes with a free 
SSH client as well, which is no where to be seen on the Blackberry.
The rest of the Blackberry's software is simularally crappy. It synced 
the time with the central server, which was nice. Too bad it's an hour 
off! T-Mobile pushes its T-Spot's quite heavily, which are basically 
"WAP" sites. I have no need in this day and age to care what "WAP" sites 
exist. WAP is dead, bring on Google or something actually useful, which 
it does support, but not readily. The screen, of course, is painful to 
look at, unlike the Sidekick's bright colors and high resolution.
So those are my recommendations for the day:
1. Don't insult the nice dominatrix
2. Don't buy a Blackberry over a Sidekick. In fact, go get a Sidekick 
now along with some Hiptop stock. It's far more likely that the Sidekick 
will get some really cool exchange syncing applications than it is that 
the Rim will get a decent user interface.
-dave


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