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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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!

It was annoying knowing that there were some songs in Bigpond’s Music Store that I couldn’t download (they were previously in stupid WMA format, and I couldn’t be stuffed downloading them to my PC, burning them to a CD, then ripping them into my Mac). So it’s tops to know that I can download MP3s now. Not everything in their catalogue is available yet… but hopefully it will grow.

I do love the “first in Australia” thing that they’re touting. Yes, perhaps it’s the first in Australia to offer MP3 files for download DRM free… but let’s not forget that iTMS have been doing their iTunes Plus thing for quite a while. And those files are DRM free. Just in the AAC file format.

Still… awesome stuff.

I recently moved my email address across to be hosted by Google Apps. Basically, I can take advantage of Gmail’s pretty good spam filtering, but also their free hosting and IMAP compatibility. IMAP is quite cool - kinda like exchange, but without the “push” side of things. It two-way synchronises email on my iPhone and my computer. So now I am moving my email back to Mail.app (after realising that it’s better then Entourage - no one is allowed to say “I told you so.”), and setting it up for IMAP.

Then on the iPhone front, I updated it to the new software now that the jailbreak software has updated as well. But since doing that, it wouldn’t sync with iTunes - everytime it was plugged in, it just pops up the “restore from a backup” or “set up as a new iPhone”. I looked around on forums and it seems to be a pretty sporadic error that a few people get when they’ve updated - even if not jailbroken.

Turns out the fix is quite easy. Seeing as I’ve already restored it from a backup, and the data is already on my iPhone… I can just now “set up as a new iPhone”, and it doesn’t really affect anything at all… except that it obviously makes the iPhone and iTunes happier to talk! So that’s what I’d be doing right now, except that the iPhone’s battery is dead.

I can smell a very yummy dinner… and can only hope that good smell means that it’s very close to being ready.

As I sat down on Mum and Dad’s couch this evening, I opened it, punched in my details, and was getting quite excited about how amazingly simple, elegant and quick it was.

I typed in my blog address, and the admin username and password. And voila, that was all that needed to be done for a self-hosting WordPress blog. Amazing. Once open, there was a list of my latest 30 posts, and I could just click on one to read it, and then simply tapping on the text brought up the keyboard for me to edit.

All was going brilliantly… it was very impressive indeed! However, as soon as I tried to save any edits, the app just crashed. Sad. It does auto-save all your progress though, which adds to the impressiveness… but that is fairly useless when I can’t actually save anything that I type.

I’m sure an update will arrive very soon.

Yay for the iPhone 3G!

My first few thoughts were that if you’re a Windows Mobile handset manufacturer, then you should be seriously scared (especially considering the Blackberry Bold is just around the corner too). This iPhone is everything a PDA should be, and has seriously pushed the envelope of mobile data technology. It’s more than I ever expected I think.

Second thought was that Apple seem to have gone out hard against RIM and Blackberry! (Which may very well be why there’s no Telstra link on Apple Australia’s iPhone site.) Not just through their “Enterprise” features… but through MobileMe. MobileMe goes way over and above what Blackberry have ever been able to provide to a non-email-server user.

I was sitting at my computer quite in awe at MobileMe. I’ve never been a huge fan of .Mac, never needed it really. But all of a sudden, this has broken through to be something extremely amazing; something that’s always been limted to corporates. It hasn’t been available to consumers at this extent. All of a sudden, everyone has dual sync emails, calendar, contacts… not just Blackberry corporates who have a $6000 server next to their Exchange server.

So yes, damn straight I want an iPhone 3G.

It doesn’t look like Telstra’s on board; which for mine, is sad. They have the best 3G coverage - no matter how you feel about them, that’s pretty undisputed. But, my guess is that they feel it would entrench far too much on Blackberry (who seem to be getting very close to Telstra with this new HSDPA Blackberry only just around the corner), and very possibly, the lack of Bigpond/Telstra branding on the handset may be against Sol’s directive for mobile handsets. That’s just a huge guess on my part though.

So Voda or Optus? My choice will be down to price - if one of them brings out an unlimited data plan, I’ll be there queuing up at the store with the rest of ‘em.

I’m just doing the reading of updates on AppleGazette while I listen to the new Offspring album that is streaming. I do indeed love this new Offspring album. Definitely very Consiracy/Americana. Very cool indeed. I’m hoping it’ll still be up on their site when I get to work later on so I can listen to it a bit more.

After the presentation, I will try and head back to sleep for a few hours before work, I think.

edit: More Offspring thoughts… There’s piano on an Offspring track! Perhaps for the first time ever? And another interesting point is that 4 out of the 12 tracks are 4 minutes+.