Solution to a touchy subject
The Age
Thursday July 23, 2009
Charles Wright thinks he's just put his finger on it. WHILE the Bleeding Edge Social Research Laboratory has not completed its analysis of the characteristics of keypad-oriented people versus those who favour using touchscreens, we are convinced that personal preferences in mobile handset navigation could provide invaluable indicators to personality.This occurred to us last week as we were setting up a BlackBerry Bold 9000 for the Bleeding Edge spouse to replace her Palm Treo 650, which was at the point of imminent collapse.We had tried for a few weeks to convince her to switch instead to the iPhone, which had captured Bleeding Edge's imagination earlier this year, but she remained resolutely uninterested. Her objection was reasonable enough: she found it all but impossible to use the iPhone's virtual keyboard.She calculated that it took her about twice as long to tap out an SMS message on the iPhone screen. Now that she needed something that would allow her to send and receive mobile emails, the typing load would increase and she had to have a qwerty keyboard.This seemed to us an important clue to our different characters. We had been aware of the fact that our own keyboard speed had taken a considerable hit since we had bought the iPhone, but we'd convinced ourselves this was a temporary handicap we would overcome once we had adjusted to the touchscreen's eccentricities.It hadn't worked out that way. While we had improved our technique by learning shortcuts and practising with an application called Typing Genius, even the iPhone's remarkably efficient error-correction technology had not completely compensated for our tendency, which we don't imagine is unique, to consistently hit neighbouring keys.Keyboard-oriented users were less forgiving. They also seemed to be much more focused on productivity. While the spouse was looking at practical considerations (aside from a desultory fascination with solitaire), we'd been wooed by the entertainment potential of video on the larger iPhone screen and applications that were not completely work-related.When the spouse eventually settled on her BlackBerry Bold - Research In Motion's premium keypad device - we gained another insight into our personality. It turned out we were pretty smug. We were convinced that within a couple of days our life partner would regret not following our advice. We simply didn't expect the Bold to perform so well.It was not an auspicious beginning. Our first task was to transfer the contents of her Palm Desktop address book and task list. Unfortunately, it didn't work for us straight away but once we got the Switch Device Wizard working it went brilliantly.We'd dismissed the BlackBerry out of a perception it was a tool for enterprise employees with IT teams and big budgets that could support the expense of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES).It seemed, though, that the spouse's small business could get most of the benefits of features like push email from the cheaper BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), so we signed her up for a BIS package with Telstra Next G, which is the only network we trust for reliable mobile services.Telstra's customer support, which seems at times to be as bewildered by its products as novice users, initially insisted that we'd have to settle for a standard $100 phone plan ($90 of included calls and $10 of data) with an additional BlackBerry browsing pack for $29.95 a month on a two-year contract.We called again persistence is an absolute necessity when you're dealing with Telstra and found someone who agreed to bolt the browser pack on to a Next G $79 business capped phone plan. That gave the spouse her handset, $450 of monthly calls, unlimited email and 150 megabytes of mobile data for just over $120 a month.Subsequently, we've been told that there are no additional data charges if you use the BlackBerry's inbuilt browser, so we may with yet another phone call to Telstra be able to dispense the data pack.The BIS option allows up to 10 separate email accounts. We thought we'd have problems getting it to work with the spouse's FastMail IMAP email service (fastmail.fm) but the BlackBerry knew all the FastMail settings. It was equally easy to set up the BlackBerry to usewi-fi at home and the office and hook it up to a BlueAnt car hands-free set.To improve even more on what we've come belatedly to regard as the best mobile communications device on the market, we installed Google Calendar's BlackBerry sync (tinyurl.com/lkmwbv) and we set up a Remember The Milk Pro ToDo and Task account for her, which also has a BlackBerry synchronisation tool, MilkSync (tinyurl.com/4arogv).With Research In Motion recently unveiling its own apps store and last week launching its new MyBlackBerry social networking site to say nothing of suggestions Google Voice (as yet not in Australia) will be extended to BlackBerry handsets the Bold is looking ever more attractive. The Bleeding Edge Social Research Laboratory has detected yet another characteristic of touchscreen users: they seem ever so slightly prone to feelings of envy.
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