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Over the past few months I’ve gone through several phones and several different carriers.
It started back a May when I killed my iPhone 3G and ended December with an iPhone 3GS on T-Mobile.. I’ll make another post with more details on that.

Part of my quest inclueded looking at Android phones, other than the Hero, since I had the Hero for a few weeks and had issues.
Verizon is too expensive, plus I don’t like the Droid, so that left me at T-Mobile.

I found out about the plans at T-Mobile that you can bring your own phone and pay a cheaper month to month plan, sweet!
On AT&T I had 450 minutes, 1500 Text and unlimited web and AFTER a corporate discount, it was costing me $80 a month.
Over at T-Mobile, my plan is 500 minutes, unlimited text and unlimited web for $60 a month and NO CONTRACT.

I started doing some research and thought I’d give it a try using my 3Gs on T-Mobile. I’m happy to say that at this point the only thing I don’t have, that I had on AT&T is 3G since the 3G on AT&T and T-Mobile are not compatible.

I really don’t care about 3G – Youtube works fine over T-Mobile Edge, Slacker Radio works fine, basically I haven’t run any apps that didn’t work fine over the Edge network.

Oh, I even have a solution for Visual Voicemail.
Youmail is a free service that you redirect your voicemail to and you can do it from any phone, they also have an iPhone app with push notification and when you go in the app it’s very similar to the native visual voicemail.. so that problem was solved.

I’m VERY happy with this setup and, if requested, I’d be happy to post a tutorial on how I did it.. although there are a TON of them out there.

If anyone is thinking of trying this combination – DO IT and save yourself some $$.

I got the Hero on launch day and am trying it out for 30 days. I’m trying to decide if I am going to go back to the Pre or keep the Hero… at this point it’s looking good for the Hero.

One thing I’m not crazy about on the Hero is the battery life, it’s about the same as the Pre, but I was hoping for better.
I started to do some research and have done two things that have DRAMATICALLY improved my battery life:

1. Apparently there is an issue with the HTC SMS/MMS client. It does some “hokey” stuff behind the scenes and, long story short, keeps your phone from properly going to sleep.
   • I fixed this by installing ‘Handcent SMS’ – It does all the same stuff as the built in client, but no issues with the sleep.
   • I then went in and turned off the notifications for the built in SMS
2. Go to Menu –> Settings –> Wireless Controls –> Mobile Network Sharing –> Enable always-on Mobile Network and disable it.
   • So far the only negative I’ve noticed on this is that I have to manually refresh Facebook.. email, SMS, MMS, etc… all still notify on new messages.

Over the next few days I’ll try and collect some concrete numbers, but I can tell you after making these changes I still have significant battery life at the end of the day.

HTH

I’ve been using the Palm Pre since two days after release and REALLY like it. A while ago I broke my iPhone and since my AT&T contract was almost up, I borrowed my friend’s old Treo until the Pre and iPhone 3GS came out and then decided on the Pre.
I have no regrets about that decision.

I’ve always liked the idea of Android but, in my opinion, the G1 just wasn’t ready for prime time.

Then a couple of months ago I stared following the European release of the HTC Hero and fell in love (or at least lust) with the phone. Once I found out it was going to be released on Sprint I knew I’d have to try it.

So here I am finding myself with another line to try out the Sprint HTC Hero on.

I’ve only had it one day, so I’m not ready to give it any kind of review yet, but there are some things that I’m missing from the Pre already, but by the same token there are some things that I like a lot better on the Hero.

Things I miss from the Pre:

• Gestures – It’s amazing how used to these you get
• Hardware keyboard – the software keyboard on the Hero is actually very good, at least as good as the iPhone, but doesn’t match a hardware keyboard
• Camera – The camera on the Hero may be higher megapixel, but it’s MUCH slower and no flash

Things I like better on the Hero:

• The GPS seems MUCH more accurate, Sprint Navigation seems to be much smoother as well
• The compass mode in Google Maps – This is just plain cool.
• The amount of apps available in the Android Market.
• A true Facebook app and widget
• Micro SD / SDHC support – Can increase storage up to 32 Gigs

Again, I’ve only had the Hero one day so I’ll post a proper review after I have it for a while, but this is my findings after a day with the device.

Don’t get me wrong, so far I REALLY like it, but we’ll see if it’s a match for my beloved Pre.

If you’d like to see any tutorials on how to set things up on the phone, or would like me to make specific videos or reviews please feel free to let me know.

I’m looking forward to the Palm Pre coming out and, as such, I’ve been looking for a way to have all my contact info, calendar and email online.
I also wanted to this because I have a desktop machine, laptop and work computer that I use Thunderbird on and wanted to keep my info sync’d.

Well, thanks to a few of the great developers I now have my Email, Calendar, and contacts in Thunderbird syncing to Google, here’s how

Email:

This is the easy part.
Sign up for a free Gmail account and set up Thunderbird to connect via POP3 or IMAP.

I prefer IMAP since I use the three computers, IMAP will mark things as read when you read them, allow you to flag items, etc.. POP3 shows everything as unread on all the computers.

Calendar:

First of all, Thunderbird does not have a calendar built in when you first install it, but there is an EXCELLENT AddOn called Mozilla Lightning.

Mozilla Lightning

There is also a stand alone calendar application called Sunbird if you don’t want to have it integrated in to Thunderbird.

Now that you have the calendar installed, how do you sync it with your Google Calendar?
That’s where ‘Provider for Google Calendar‘ comes in.

This is a fantastic plugin that allows you to have read AND write access to your calendar.
Whatever changes you make in Thunderbird show up on your Google Calendar, whatever changes you make in Google show up in Thunderbird.. it’s a beautiful thing.

Contacts:

This gave me a little trouble.
It took me a little while to find a plugin that would work well for me.

I first tried a plugin call Zindus.
I had that installed for about a week and thought it was great, but then realized it didn’t sync any addresses, just phone numbers and emails.

After doing some reasearch I found that you have to turn on the address option, but it will store your addresses in XMLish format in Google.
The problem is that Google Contacts stores addresses as one big text field, rather than individual fields for street, city, state, etc… I assume this is to make it “international friendly” which is a good thing.

Well, this format didn’t work for me, so I went looking again.

This time I found the ‘Google Contacts’ AddOn and this one worked MUCH better for me.
Except for the address portion, it’s basically zero configuration. It will detect the accounts you already have setup and go and grab you contacts.. very nice!

Two little gotchas:

1. In the ‘General’ tab I had to set the number of contacts to download to 500. I thought I could leave it as zero and it’d just get everything, but it didn’t download all my contacts that way, BTW I have no where near 500 contacts.
   

   Google Contacts General tab

2. You have to turn on address conversion and change the way you want it to be displayed – either character delimited or ‘use a line break’, I use comma delimited. If you look at the address in Google it’s one long string with commas between each portion of the address, but in Thunderbird on all the computers it displays correctly.
   

   Address conversion

So now all my stuff is syncing online, it looks the same on all my computers running Thunderbird and I’m a happy camper.

The best thing is that I can use Thunderbird on any OS, as long as I have the plugins, and it will all look the same.

My latest obsession is the Palm Pre and I have been scouring the Internet reading everything I can and watching all the videos I can.

There have been a lot of interesting posts about the device, but one thing I’m getting annoyed with is the complaints about release date.

Palm has said that it will be out the first half of ‘09, period.
I actually am OK with the fact that there’s no more concrete date than that, if they need more time to ensure a stable device then I don’t care if it’s released the last day of June.

That view is not shared by most of the posts I’ve read.
I’ve seen numerous posts about people complaining there is no release date yet, how they’re going to go buy some other phone because they’re sick of waiting, etc…

The end of June isn’t even here yet, it’s not even MAY yet, how can people be so annoyed that it’s not here yet when we’re still about two months away from the deadline.

Stop making up dates, stop trusting in the rumor mill and just wait it out.

I’m more excited for this phone that I can put in words, but I’m not expecting it to be out before the end of the year (like Palm said), any earlier is a bonus.