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Telstra has demonstrated over the last 5 years that it can be a leader in the world telecommunications marketplace. It went from a follower just riding on the coat-tails of a copper network, to creating the biggest and fastest mobile network in the world.

Yet this morning, the Australian government has decided that it doesn’t like an Australian company being too successful. After all the the time, money and effort that Telstra has invested into becoming the leaders, the Government has decided that it’s time to slow it down.

They announced a series of reforms to telecommunications legislation that will essentially force the break-up of Telstra. Stephen Conroy tried to make it look nice by saying that Telstra can voluntarily choose to break up the way it wants, but then swiftly added that if they didn’t, the goverment will break them up anyway. And added a boot in by saying it’ll block any new mobile spectrum acquisitions until “it structurally separates, divests its … cable network and divests its interests in Foxtel.” Talk about bullying.

For me, this just seems like it’s going to make it very, very difficult for Australia to continue to be a world leader in the mobile broadband marketplace. Telstra’s advancements have forced Optus, Voda and 3 to play along or get left behind, and has meant that we have four 3G mobile networks in Australia. That’s massive for a country of our size compared with the US and China. And so by slowing down Telstra and forcing it to separate, are Optus, Voda and 3 going to bother making anymore advancements? They won’t have anyone to try and keep up with.

It just feels like the government has caved in to the whinging and whining of other telecommunications companies in Australia, who aren’t as far ahead as Telstra, and has just chopped it right down to slow its growth.

Somehow, the government thinks that a 100Mbps nationwide fibre network is the answer to Australia’s broadband problems… but in 8 years when its built, it will already be redundant. And in that time, Telstra would’ve been beyond that point in wireless broadband. Wonder if that will still happen, or if this will signify the beginning’s of the government’s monopoly on Australia-wide telecommunications?

And lastly, I loved the nomination that Stephen Conroy put forward for himself for the Ignorant and Stupid Comments of the Year awards:

Senator Conroy said Telstra copper network was literally “collapsing in the ground”.

“Every time there is a flood, every time there is heavy rain in northern NSW, Queensland, there is a further degradation of some part of Telstra’s copper network,” he said. “There is an enormous maintenance requirement every year to continue to just try and keep it where it’s at.”

The infrastructure in the ground was actually blocking the capacity to deliver decent broadband.

Bring on the comments telling me that Telstra is a big bully and that it’s the right thing for “competition” and for Australia – I’d love to hear them and I’m ready for a fight. Cos you try and tell me that the government isn’t being the biggest bully of them all right now.

[smh link]

I thought twice about writing this… but none of it was asked to be kept quiet, and I don’t think I’m saying anything that isn’t already known.

Today I got to meet with the guy who looks after iPhone sales to enterprises and governments in Australia for Apple. He’s a pretty tops guy. I definitely enjoyed his thoughts on getting iPhone fleets happening in businesses, and what the device can do for them as opposed to what it can do for consumers. It really is a very powerful device. We get to hear from Apple for a couple of hours in a presentation sometime in the next fortnight. They’re gonna share a lot about the iPhone in the enterprise world. I’m really looking forward to that, especially the security stuff.

I had a few giggles to myself during the 90 minutes or so, cos he’s definitely Apple’s whole marketing strategy personified – the secrecy, the knowledge that they’re better than everyone else, the exclusivity. He even talked about Apple’s strategy to have the iPhone becoming as much a “throw-around” word as iPod is – that is, even if you have some random MP3 player, people tend to refer to any MP3 player as an “iPod” … Apple want that same brand recognition with iPhone. Incredible.

And we asked them about participating in a data forum where we’d bring customers, and we like to have vendors assisting with setting up a stand and showcasing what they’ve got. He said they’d only be interested if there was no other mobile provider involved.

We talked about the hows and whens of getting iPhones into the hands of us tech sales people to use, and Apple wanted a commitment that we’d use it as our primary phone (work-wise) for at least a month before deciding whether or not to keep it. I liked that. They weren’t just giving them to us for us to use as demos and to sit in a drawer for weeks on end. And they follow up over the next weeks and months with weekly updates of app recommendations for us.

Can’t wait to get my hands on my new iPhone. Using it for work will be quite a different experience, I think.

It made for a fun Friday. Apple are a good bunch of people.

On the topic, I made my blog iPhone friendly tonight – you can check it out on your iPhone or iPod Touch and it looks nothing like what it does in a normal browser… but at least it loads very quickly and simply.

And I added a tweetmeme link down the bottom. Useful? Probably not. But cool nonetheless.

So Saturday morning things got a bit exciting – Grant rang me from Hervey Norman in Belrose letting me know that the Rock Band Instrument Pack was on sale for $150. It had the drums and guitar and mic! It’s different to Guitar Hero that I wanted the drums for… but just different songs, and slightly different game.

Debbie was ok with me buying it, and so during the afternoon we headed out to Belrose for me to pick it up. And later on in the afternoon, I unpacked the box. And as I unpacked things, I realised that I was yet to find the game disc. And once the box was emptied, there was no game disc anywhere. And it was at this point that I noticed the label on the front of the box saying “Game Disc Not Included.”

Whoops.

I did some hunting around game shops in Hornsby, but was hearing from all of them that the game had been discontinued for Wii. Not the instruments, just the game. [Further research tonight has shown that that's probably because Rock Band 2 is due out here soon.]

But eBay comes to the rescue… and I picked it up there for $22! Should have it in my hands ready to make use of my new drum kit on Wednesday. And then I’ll be able to enjoy more songs. And convince Debbie that I want to buy Rock Band 2, and Rock Band Unplugged, and all the other Rock Band titles. :)

Glad to see I haven’t lost my teenage gamer nerdiness.

Based on my twitter profile. From my TweetStats, here.

It’s been a big year for Twitter… certainly in Australia. Media coverage has increased about 4 million times. And plenty of celebrities have jumped on board, as well as heaps and heaps of just regular people too. And after probably about 3 years [how do you find out how long you've been a part of twitter?] and some 5400 updates, I’m loving Twitter more today than any other day before it. The big increase in coverage and such has helped me find a bundle more people to follow, and it’s definitely made it a lot more fun. Following lots more people means lots more updates – a Twitter client sits on my PC at work, beeping at me every couple of minutes; I have the same Twitter client on my Mac; I have a client on my iPhone for when I’m not sitting in front of my computer; and I also have a client on my Blackberry. I wonder if I’m addicted?

@stephenconroy was a very satirical twitter account that poked fun at Stephen Conroy, the great internet filtering debate, and just politics in general really. It was cool to follow and laugh at. And if you happen to read any tech news, you will have found out that things have blown up in a big way with regards to that…

Fake Stephen Conroy outed himself as a Telstra employee, and the media loved it. There was all sorts of back and forths, and wonderings if Telstra would stand for it, etc. It blew up for a few days, and then kinda died down. And then a couple of days ago, Leslie Nassar (Fake Stephen Conroy, @stephenconroy) jumped on the end of a joke someone had posted suggesting he should be the new CEO of Telstra! His resulting blog post is here.

I thought it was quite funny. Very satirical, and I thought it was clearly satirical too. But I guess some people in Telstra had pretty much had enough of everything, and so as of this morning, he was no longer employed at Telstra. Essentially he was fired. But the wording and circumstances are a bit disputed: Telstra’s version; Leslie’s version [language warning].

Personally… well, let’s just say that I think it’s wise to perhaps maintain some form employer anonymity online. I probably don’t do the best job of that in my whole online presence, but I’m deliberately quite careful when writing blog posts specifically.

The whole thing been fun to follow; there’s been some very, very funny posts and tweets… and I hope they continue. As for Leslie Nassar – he’s one of the most famous people in Australian tech news right at this moment. I would be incredibly surprised if he doesn’t get himself some form of satirical gig writing for Zdnet or similar. Can only hope.

I spent the last week feeling like I was back in school.

As part of our education in the whole fixed data sales side that I’ve stepped into in the last few months, they sent us on a week long networking design course. Monday to Friday, 9-5 in a classroom, do some serious learning each day… it was pretty intense having not spent that long in a classroom since high school!

But the learning was great. We spent a bit of time going through the “methodology” type stuff – that is, the “how” of selling; pretty boring considering we’ve done it to death – but the rest of the time was spent going into some deep technical stuff. We nailed IP addressing, all the routing protocols, all the 802.x standards… it was great.

It was all the stuff I went to uni to learn. But I did it in a week.

Food was supplied too.. and it wasn’t half bad. And that was my week. Now I need to head back to the office tomorrow and find out how sales have been going and what the gap is that will need to be made up by the end of March.

Off to have lunch with Debbie’s Grandma & Grandpa today… fish and chips, very good.

I thought we were good friends. For years now, me and technology have got on so well. And even when technology didn’t want to be nice to other people, when I’d get there, he’d be ok with talking to me. We had a great relationship!

But clearly, I’ve done something to offend technology. All of a sudden, he’s turned his back on me; he’s taken the nearest knife and driven it fair into my back.

On Saturday night, our ADSL decided to just die. No particular reason. 15 minutes on the phone to iiNet didn’t get too far, except for her telling me to factory reset my modem. And then the call dropped out. By this time it was nearly midnight and I was tired. So Sunday morning I spent another 20 minutes or so on the phone, and after resetting some settings that weren’t put in place after the factory reset, everything was working. But I was sceptical. And then Monday arvo, the internet was down again. I called iiNet and tried to explain that we hadn’t changed anything and that it was most likely a problem on their end. But after much back and forth, it did seem very possible that my modem was faulty. So there was no internet til I could get my hands on another ADSL modem to check.

But upon arriving home from parentals’ place last night, I glanced at the modem and noticed the ‘ADSL’ light was on. A quick check on the laptop, and sure enough, everything was back up without any effort on my part! But that’s actually more annoying than helpful, because I have no idea what the problem was.

While all this was going on, yesterday morning, the fridge didn’t seem to be very cold at all. But without being sure as to whether the door was actually closed or not, I didn’t think much of it. But again upon arrival home from Mum & Dad’s place last night, it was pretty definite that the fridge wasn’t working at all.

It was funny to see that my first instinct was to power-cycle the fridge – to turn it off at the powerpoint and wait a few seconds and then plug it back in. I’m clearly a child of technology. I had a laugh to myself as I realised that without any intelligence in the motor of the fridge, power-cycling it would do absolutely nothing.

What a fun house.

But I must say, in the first 3-4 months of living there, aside from the hot-water/possum issues, there has been almost nothing go wrong in that house. So we’ve had a good run.

It’s true I guess… everything goes wrong all at once.

So Telstra has increased the speed of its mobile network – 21Mbps is the new peak speed, with 42Mbps still looking likely for end of ‘09.

Whether it be jealously or some other reason, Optus has come out and had a bit of a go at trying to slam Telstra. I say “a bit” because they didn’t try very hard… they used some pretty weak arguments:

“The fact is customers will need to buy a new modem and live/work beneath a base station to take advantage of these ‘theoretical’ speeds.”

So how about Optus’ expansion of their 3G network into country areas that works on a new frequency – do customers need a new handset to take advantage of that coverage and high speed on the 900Mhz frequency? Hmmm.

“This is another example of Telstra misleading Australian businesses and consumers into thinking they will now experience speeds of 21Mbps across the whole Next G network.”

And how’s Optus’ 3.6Mbps 3G network going for its customers – are they experiencing 3.6Mbps download speeds when they use it? How about your ADSL2+ connection at home – are you seeing 20Mbps when you use that? Hmmm.

“Telstra is already charging $59.95 per month for 1GB of data which is way above the rest of the market (Optus offers 6GB for $59.99). We shudder to think what additional premium they will charge customers to access ‘theoretical’ speeds of 21Mbps.”

I will just double check my sales figures… but I’m pretty sure I have customers purchasing Telstra Mobile Broadband devices from me on a daily basis. They are very well aware that Optus, Voda and Three’s data cards are cheaper. But they choose Telstra because of the speed, coverage and reliability – sometimes, things like that are more important than price. The quality tends to be fairly visible in the price.

So thanks for your comments, Andrew Buay, but you should probably just focus on looking after your fibre optics up north. Wouldn’t want someone to accidentally trip over the extension cord and send QLD offline yet again.

One of the exciting things about getting a new Mac was that it was an Intel machine. I’d managed to get a copy of the image that goes onto all our work machines off a colleague in Melbourne, and I was excited to put that on a partition of my Mac so I could do away with my pathetically slow Toshiba laptop that isn’t due to be replaced for another 15 months.

I got the file (a DMG image), and looked through the contents. There was an instruction guide, which gave heaps of instructions, but basically only said that the CD (of which I just had the image of) is bootable and you just need to start the computer with it in the drive. That was all fine, I thought, I just need to get this main computer image file (a Nortons’ Ghost image), put it on a CD, and make that CD boot into DOS with Ghost to do it all.

[The next couple of paragraphs are pretty nerdy.]

I thought that would be easy. Turns out it isn’t. The Mac’s CD drive isn’t compatible with the standard DOS Oak CD driver. Even drivers I found that were supposed to work wouldn’t. So I moved onto USB and trying to put some USB ASPI drivers into the config.sys file, but they wouldn’t work either. (And by this time, most of the week had passed.) Last night, I tried a couple more USB drivers, but still no luck. And I was getting to the point where I thought I’d give up.

And then my colleague sent me a Twitter message, basically implying that the DMG file that he’d sent me originally was already bootable and that I didn’t need to do anything. That was a pretty important bit of information that I’d completely missed when he first gave it to me, and I hadn’t even thought to check.

ARGH!

And so, after checking this morning, sure enough, all I needed to do was to burn that DMG file to a CD and boot. And it would work! And I could’ve done that last weekend!

So I’ll be doing that on Monday… cos once it boots, it needs to be connected to our LAN to register itself to the Active Directory server and pull down all the programs I need.

It was a bit of a waste of a week… but it was still a heck of a lot of fun playing around in DOS and remembering how config.sys and autoexec.bat files work. Made me fondly remember the days of Westfields Sports High. :)

Telstra is likely to deploy its own fibre network into metropolitan areas, although Senator Conroy would not rule out legislation against such a move…
[australianit]

So just to make sure I understand this clearly… no one wants Telstra to be a “monopoly”, least of all, Stephen Conroy (who I’m loving just about as much as Helen Coonan, by the way). But when Telstra suggest plans to build their own FTTN network in competition with the one the government wants to roll out, in order to stimulate price and access and give greater broadband access to most of Australia, Stephen Conroy wants to put legistlation in to stop that? So that he can have the monopoly?

Surely there’s something I’m missing there about the sheer hypocrisy of that. Surely.

How awesome would it be if we had two FTTN networks in Australia! Why would you want to stop that?!

Saturday night was hanging out with B, and it was my introduction to Urban Terror – a completely free game that is built on the highly awesome Quake 3 engine. While built on an old engine, it’s still very cool and is really not at all like Q3 in many ways.

In between eating some Chinese and chatting about IT and iPhones, there was lots of shooting and blood… and after 6 or 7 games, I was stoked to be able to say that in the last game of the night, I beat him :)

It is quite a cool game. One of b’s bollege buddies has spent many hours creating a map based on Morling College. It was quite fun running around dorm rooms, the chapel and the kitchen as well :) Looking forward to playing some more… and good to see that my Powerbook managed to keep up.

I don’t mind reading articles in various media outlets about Telstra… some of them bag Telstra out a bit, but generally they’re not too personal about. And more and more often, they’re becoming very educated in their writings, and not just ignorantly writing untruths about Telstra. Most journos are finally starting to understand that yeah, Telstra is expensive, but if you want the best quality, then you need to pay more for it. Simple.

But with online news publishers having the ability for any random PEBKAC (look it up) user with a keyboard and to comment on the story… far out, there’s some ignorance and arrogance in there. So many people just throwing opinions around and just having absolutely no idea what they’re talking about! Some of the comments are just full-on stabs at another user who’s put forward a positive comment about Telstra, calling them all sorts of names. And AustralianIT publishes the comments because they’re in the spirit of the story or debate (I can’t find the exact quote that they give you when you submit a comment). I struggle to sit there and read some of them because I just feel myself getting so very angry!

Anyway, AustralianIT published a story yesterday about Telstra’s bid… or rather, it was about Optus having a whinge at someone else’s bid. If I was Optus, I’d just be worried about my own bid, and wondering if I’m gonna have any of my mates left to help me pay for the costs to build it.

But I reckon people should stop whinging about Telstra’s bid. It doesn’t meet the bid requirements – so what. If it doesn’t meet them, then Stephen Conroy won’t give the tender to Telstra. Not that complicated. It certainly doesn’t require every other bidder to have their say on how Telstra are “a joke”, etc. Telstra were pretty much damned if they did, and damned if they didn’t – when they weren’t going to submit a bit, everyone was having a go at them about that. And when they did submit something, albeit short, they were slammed about that.

I still don’t understand why people are so up in arms about Telstra wanting the government to confirm they won’t be separated – if Telstra were to be awarded the tender for the NBN, and then separated again, it would severely affect the capability to rollout the tender! Not overly hard to understand. Yet the government didn’t want to talk.

In the end, if Telstra, or any other company, get the tender, it will be because they have the capability to provide the best broadband network in Australia for Australians. That’s what the whole bid is about, in case anyone had forgotten.

I began to leave work a little early – I’d been emailed to say that naked DSL was active at our place and I was keen to get home and play. Half an hour later, I finally left the office when I found my keys.

Then I spent an hour on Pennant Hills Rd. Not fun. Mental note for next week, find a different Friday afternoon route home, or prepare for a one hour journey.

Finally I got home. Debbie’s parents were kind enough to give us their old ADSL router (they’ve since moved across to cable), and so I updated its firmware to the latest from Netgear, and got it all set up, and then successfully connected it up to our iiNet service… and voila:

I am pretty happy with those speeds. Just as I was typing this though, the connection dropped for no apparent reason. It re-connected itself a few seconds later… but that was strange. And doing subsequent speed tests has only given me about 5Mbps down and the same upload speeds. So I’ll be watching that over the next couple of days with interest…

Something interesting that iiNet have in their account settings is a thing called Speed Connection Manager where you can “adjust” the speed of your ADSL connection. Interesting. There’s 5 settings: 

 

Safe	ADSL1 Speed up to 8,000kbps	If you have an older modem it may not support ADSL2/2+ speeds in excess of 8,000kbps. So play it safe.
Controlled	ADSL2/2+ Speeds up to 24,000 kbps (FAST)	If you want to push the speed up a little but keep a stable connection. You may need this if you have poor line quality.
Standard	ADSL2/2+ Speeds up to 24,000 kbps (FASTER)	This is our default setting that suits most users. It’s still really fast, but usually gives good connection stability.
Thrillseeker	ADSL2/2+ Speeds up to 24,000 kbps (FASTEST)	If you want to push the broadband speed limit. You’ll definitely get the fastest speeds possible on your line. But you may hit the occasional speed bump or two.
Gamer	ADSL2/2+ Speeds up to 24,000 kbps (UNINTERRUPTED)	Well suited for time sensitive, interactive applications such as gaming, this selection is designed to provide the quickest connection response rather than a faster download speed.

I quickly moved my setting from the “standard” up to “gamer”. The tech nerd inside me wonders what is changed with my ADSL connection with each setting, especially considering the last 4 are all ADSL2+. They say the changes may take a few hours to take effect. So I’ll play around with them a bit more over the next few days.

Exciting! Tomorrow is hopefully the day – iiNet Naked DSL should be switched on at [insert funky house name that we haven't come up with yet here].

They “connected” the phone line about a week ago – the line has a dial tone, but when I rang to ask about that, they said it’s kind of a pseudo connection, cos you can’t make calls on it. It just means it’s connected at the exchange. I’m glad I rang, cos they told me I didn’t actually have to be home tomorrow arvo.

And then tomorrow is the switch-on day. They say they’ll email me once it’s active… but I’ll have my fingers crossed that it’s the same day. I decided to go with naked DSL (basically ADSL without a working landline number) cos we’ll only be here for 6 months [likely], and I don’t think we really need a landline anyway, but not for just 6 months. So I’ll get Debbie on a better mobile plan, and we’ll be happy with just mobiles :)

I would love to better understand naked DSL – I am really beginning to understand ADSL properly, and also understanding how Telstra’s SHDSL works (which is super cool), and then understanding how you can put all those different access types in together to make an IP network that sits off the internet – but because Telstra doesn’t sell naked DSL, that’s not something I’ve really learnt about.

Maybe I’ll do some Wikipedia research…

Allow me to get all nerdy for a second…

I always look forward to Telstra’s Investor Day. It’s the day where our CEO and other senior people brief the public and media about the year gone and what’s ahead. But for people like me, it usually always means something new and exciting in technology is launched. There were a couple of things this year… the upgrading of the Next G network and mobile broadband modems that are capable of 21Mbps are coming in 2009 and will be the fastest in the world. Very cool.

But what seemed a bit ho-hum was MyConnect – an intergrated unified messaging system. Similar in principle to Apple’s MobileMe. You get access to all your SMS and MMS etc online from your computer, and vice-versa, can get all your email on your handset. And it all syncs up. Quite cool, but nothing new and exciting.

The new and exciting bit was something that wasn’t actually announced yesterday I don’t think – but has appeared online on a non-Telstra site: Telstra revamps Windows Mobile. While there’s no direct link between the two, I am very certain they link up. It’s all part of our CEO’s “one touch, one click, etc” vision that he came up with a few years ago. But to have Telstra come up with a skin for Windows Mobile that intergrates all your email and instant messaging and even Facebook, is pretty awesome.

This is just another one of the things that I’m liking about Telstra. For years it was always following and relying on being the monopoly. But more and more often, finally, Telstra is being the leaders and coming up with new things first. And the fact that as of next year, Next G will be the fastest mobile network in the world, with even Japan trailing behind… that’s awesome.

Spent this morning updating to iPhone 2.1. Mainly because it was there, and cos the jailbreaking people were quick off the mark to get this update hacked.

I had to laugh at one of the listed updates being “improved signal strength”.

“Surely they can’t update signal capability from the software,” thinks James.

But here I am down at church, where last Sunday night, and every Sunday night before that, I’ve barely had 1 bar of 3G coverage. And now, 3 bars and higher, consistently.

Awesome! Thanks, Apple :)

Ended up coming home from work at lunchtime today. Just felt bleh and wondered if it was the onset of a cold. Feeling better as the evening has gone on… but I guess the next few days will see how it goes.

Sunday and Monday were kept interesting following the tweets of Joe & Carly. They decided to set up a twitter profile and share the arrival of little Nadia Rose into the world. It was very, very cool to follow – felt like we were almost a part of it all! All their tweets are still up there to read.

So very much looking forward to this week being over – on Friday night, Debbie and I are heading up to the Mountains for dinner at the beautiful Italian restaurant that we visited on the day I proposed. Long way to go just for dinner, but it will be a very awesome evening I think.

Got my hands on one of these devices this afternoon. With all the excitement about the Blackberry Bold, I haven’t been all that excited about this device when otherwise, I probably would’ve been quite looking forward to it.

HTC Touch Diamond

First impressions are that it is awesomely small and light. The previous HTC model, the Touch Dual, had a pretty tops touchscreen interface that required no use of the stylus, so I’m hoping this one will be the same. I’m supposed to be demoing it to some small business customers tomorrow all day, so I hope that I’ll have good things to say about it :)

It’s running the new Windows Mobile 6.1, which is supposed to have improved quite a few things on the operation and stability of these PDAs. HTC also put their own “skin” over WM, which adds a nice home screen that is much nicer and more usable than WM’s standard home screen. The skin on the Diamond seems to have really stepped up again over the Touch Dual, and actually has a whole series of screens that are part of the “home screen”.

I think I have to give it back at the end of the week, which is a bit disappointing, but probably not all that bad. Over the last few years, I always start using a new Windows Mobile device, and after a short while using it, end up deciding that I like my Blackberry better. I think the Motorola Q was the longest serving device, and perhaps I only used that for a few months cos I felt obliged to seeing as they gave it to me. A couple of iMates, the older HTC Touch Dual, Palm Treo 750… they all only had a few weeks before I went back to my ever-reliable Blackberry.

If you’ve been following my twitters over the last day, then you’d know that I’m quite excited that today was the day I got my new Blackberry Bold!

It was a painful wait today… but eventually, at about 4pm this arvo, the courier arrived with our brand new toys. I had seen the Bold before at a couple of different events, but to finally have my own is very exciting. And better still, to finally have it before a lot of other people was awesome. (We usually get pretty badly left behind as far as devices go - even though we’re supposed to be specialists in the area.) And like I said last week, to even have it before many other people in the world is incredible for Telstra.

Telstra's Blackberry Bold

First impressions are that it is just so light for what it is. And the screen resolution is amazing as well. They have updated the software that Blackberry runs on in a pretty massive way, so while it looks and acts similarly to previous models, there’s just so many new features that are more than skin deep.

I will be keen to set it up as a tethered modem and see how it performs – it’s a 3.6Mbps HSDPA device, so I’m expecting it to hopefully cruise along at about 1.5 – 2Mbps.

My device has just finished synchronising to the server, so I now have all my emails and everything set up the way I want it – right down to the little things, like that the profile is still on vibrate, which is exactly how I had my old BB set up before I took my sim card out about 2 hours ago. See, it’s those little things that make the whole Blackberry platform cool.

The fun begins tomorrow as I venture out to deliver a couple of devices to some “special” customers. Hoping that isn’t too much of a painful process and won’t destroy my whole day.

So, in my eyes, I’ve now achieved mobile perfection: an Apple iPhone 3G for my personal, and a Blackberry Bold 9000 for my work phone. Love it.

So Blackberry are about to release their new Bold device. I think AT&T are going to be the first ones to carry it in the world, and they don’t have a firm release date yet. Supposedly though, Optus might release it before the end of August. Telstra will be very close behind in mid-September. Good that a big handset release is actually happening in Australia concurrently with the rest of the world.

But more importantly, my mobile specialist colleagues and I are getting one, which we were all very excited about. And then today, my boss told me that she got word that we may have them as early as the end of the week. That would make me amongst the first people in the world outside RIM (the makers of Blackberry) to have one… how exciting!