With my 2 year contract up with
Verizon it was now time to take the plunge and move up to a Smartphone. As much as I would have liked to have a iPhone- I'm just not sure that the ATT's coverage is as good in the mountains of New Jersey as is Verizon's coverage. So I stayed with Verizon and waited for the release of the
Blackberry Curve complete with a 2 Megapixel camera. After using it for a week I am very impressed with its features and functionality. I have been a long time Palm user and have enjoyed the ability to enter contacts and keep my schedule up to date. My first challenge was to move my contacts and calendar from my Macbook. Research in Motion makes PocketMac available for Mac users which allows you to Synch your tasks, calendar, and contacts from your Mac. After initially having a false start, I did some research to find that there was a new driver for the newer Smartphones. Once I installed the driver I was able to use Apple Synch technology and I was able to move all of my contacts and my schedule to my Blackberry Curve. I now have a very powerful phone complete with internet and email capability along with my contacts and schedule. I can now synch my Curve with my Mac with confidence.
The Curve is a very powerful smartphone with its true strength in the area of emailing. It was a cinch to set up my email accounts on the Curve and within seconds I was receiving my emails from three different email accounts. The Curve easily opened my PDF's and Word attachments which I could zoom in to read. My only disappointment is that the latest version of
VZNavigator-Traffic Enhanced, which I recently blogged about does not currently run on the Curve. When I called Verizon they informed me that it would be available but there was no time frame given for its release. While I can use the older version of VZNavigator there are a lot of missing features which I really enjoyed using. Having a larger screen on the Curve makes using the VZNavigator much more enjoyable. So far using the Curve has been a very pleasant experience and having access to GPS, internet, email, contacts and schedule in one package has really been wonderful!
My bags are packed and I off to San Antonio, TX for the National Educational Computing Conference. I will have 5 full days of educational technology and meetings with both hardware and software developers. At this conference the hardware and software developers will announce new products and services which always makes this one of the more exciting conferences of its kind. For the conference, I am packing my MacBook, Livescribe Pulse Smartpen, Olympus Digital Camera, Blackberry Curve, and FlipVideo camera. If I have learned anything, attending these conferences, is make sure you bring lots of business cards. I have lots of meetings and look forward to reporting to you from the convention floor-up to the minute news. I have set up my Jott account so that I can use my cell phone to quickly post to my blog. So if you see some minor errors please know that it is the speech recognition that is faulty. It should be a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to reporting the news to you- so stay tuned.
