John Wargo

Interesting that Torch Mobile announced today that they were purchased by RIM (and RIM didn't announce it).

There have been a lot of articles lately on the Web about how RIM's going to update the browser to match industry standards and I guess we now know. I'm curious to how this is going to work - I've always heard that WebKit was based on C, not sure how easy it's going to be to do a full port to Java so it will run on the BlackBerry. Only time will tell and I can't wait to see.

I'm continuously amazed at US Carriers attitude toward its customers. It's clear that everyday users just want to pay the carrier to use their network and be able to do whatever they want on it. The carriers of course don't want that - they want you to see them as providing specific servcies that you just can't do without and be willing to pay extra money for them. They're spending all of this money to add all these features when the majority of thier users just want email, SMS, phone and web browsing. I don't know about you, but I don't use any additional featurs provided by my carrier; I use the phone and my BlackBarry plan, nothing more.

I was reading an interesting article on FirrceWireless this morning about how all of a sudden Apple is 'still evaluating' the Google Voice application they blocked. What prompted this post was the following statement:

'In its response, AT&T said it had nothing to do with the situation.

Apple's lengthy statement included a number of interesting tidbits. The company said "There is a provision in Apple's agreement with AT&T that obligates Apple not to include functionality in any Apple phone that enables a customer to use AT&T's cellular network service to originate or terminate a VoIP session without obtaining AT&T's permission."

In letters sent earlier this month to Apple and Google as well as iPhone operator partner AT&T, the FCC asked why Apple chose to turn down Google Voice.'

Read more: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/apple-fcc-were-still-evaluating-google-voice-app/2009-08-21?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss&cmp-id=OTC-RSS-FW0#ixzz0P6OpuQLM.

The carriers are so afraid of VOIP since it allows customers to just use their network - even for voice calls. All of that revenue from phone minutes that are never used would go away if I could do VOIP over my BlackBerry data plan.

What most people don't realize is that for most of these so called VOIP solutions for BlackBerry the phone call is still made over the Voice network. It's not a VOIP call. When you place a call on Skype for BlackBerry and likely Google Voice, the application connects to a data center somewhere and tells it the user wants to make a call. The back-end application dials the BlackBerry device and, when the BlackBerry application accepts the call, dials the desitination phone number and connects it to the BlackBerry. There's no VOIP here - the app is using the data network to initiate the call, but the actual call is executed on the carrier's voice network.

The other mind boggling aspect of this is UMA - a technology used by T-Mobile in the US to allow you to use a Wi-Fi network connection to place voice calls. Yep, it's VOIP, but get this - you have to pay the carrier to use it.  So, if you own a company and you have a Wi-Fi network, you can place calls over your own internal network, but your wireless carrier is going to charge you a monthly fee to use the feature. Huh? You're going to charge me to use my own network and equipment to place phone calls?  That's CRAZY!

The carriers are going to have to wake up and realize what their customers really want and stop blocking these technologies. If not, there's going to be a revolution. Some carrier is going to come around that's going to understand that they're just a pipe and make it easy for their customers. I'd gladly pay $100 a month to be able to do anything I wanted on the network - provided they stopped putting all sorts of junk applications on my devcie and stopped trying to get me to buy all sorts of extra services.

AS a follow-up to my BlackBerry keyboard shortcuts, I thought I’d share some Notes client keyboard shortcuts that I have always found helpful. As mentioned previously, I’m a keyboard guy – my hands are already hovering over the keyboard, why would I leave the keyboard to grab a mouse when I can get it done with what’s at hand (sorry about the pun).

These shortcuts have been around forever, but so many people just don’t seem to know about them.

In the Notes client, when you want to open a document in a view, just press the ‘Enter’ key and Notes will open it. You probably knew that one, but so many people will double-click on it as if they don’t know there’s another way.

When you have a document open and you want to delete it, just press the ‘delete’ key – there’s no need to return to the view to delete it. If there are documents in the view below the one you opened, Notes will mark the current document for deletion then open the next document in the view – nice, huh?

If you’re reading a document in a view and you want to open the next document in the view, there’s no need to close the current document then navigate to the next one – just press the ‘Enter’ key and Notes will close the current document then open the next.

If you’re reading a document in a view and you want to open the previous document in the view, there’s no need to close the current document then navigate to the previous one – just press the ‘Backspace’ key and Notes will close the current document then open the previous.

Imagine you’re populating a database with a lot of new documents. You have a list of data in front of you and you have to add a separate document for every row in a spreadsheet. Perhaps it’s a list of postal codes, product numbers or even office locations. There’s a keyboard shortcut that will simplify the whole process and allow you to add those documents in no time.

What you need to do is open the view and create the first document. While the new document is open for editing in Notes, press the three key Ctrl-Shift-Enter  combination (I always find it easy to press and hold the Ctrl key, then do the same with the Shift key and finally press the Enter key then release). Notes will save the current document, close it then create a new blank document using the same form used for the previous document (the one you saved using this keyboard shortcut).

Nice, right? This is my favorite Notes keyboard shortcut of all time. It’s been in the client since Notes 2 and almost nobody knows about it. Try it out and let me know how much time you think this will save you the next time you need to populate a database by hand.

You probably already know this, but I thought I’d write about it anyway just in case. So many times people pick up a new piece of technology and focus so much on the hard things that they miss some of the cool easy things. For smartphones, all of them have special shortcuts that make day to day use of them less painful – but so many users just don’t know about them.

On the BlackBerry smartphone, most business people spend the majority of their time in the email client write, reading, filing, forwarding and responding. Since it takes up so much of your time, let’s make sure you’re as efficient as possible. I’m a keyboard guy, so that’s where a lot of this comes from. It’s not that I don’t like to use the trackball or a mouse, but when I’m on a computer or my BlackBerry, my hands (or my thumbs) are already hovering above the keyboard, so I just don’t feel the need to move over (or up) to grab the mouse or trackball when I can just use the keyboard.  Here we go…

When you open the BlackBerry ‘Messages’ application, the highlight is always on the current date. To create a new email message, merely press the enter key with the date selected and the BlackBerry will open a new message for you to start typing in. There’s no need to click the menu button and select ‘Compose Email.’

To open an email message, there’s no need to click the trackball or use the menu to open a message, just select the message and press the ‘Enter’ key.

When browsing messages in the Messages application, the following shortcuts are active:

• ‘t’: Go to the top of the message list
• ‘b’: Go to the bottom of the message list
• ‘u’: Go to the first (oldest) unread message
• ‘n’: Go to the next date in the list
• ‘p’: Go to the previous date in the list
• ‘space bar’: To page down through the list of messages one screen at a time.
• ‘i’: to file the selected message in a folder

With a message highlighted in the message list, you can delete the message by pressing the ‘delete’ key on the keyboard. There’s no need to open the menu and select ‘Delete’ - that takes much longer.

When reading a message, the same keys apply:

• ‘t’: Go to the top of the message
• ‘b’: Go to the bottom of the message
• ‘u’: Go to the first (oldest) unread message in the message list
• ‘n’: Go to the next date message in the message list
• ‘p’: Go to the previous date in the message list
• ‘space bar’: To page down through the message one screen at a time
• ‘i’: to file the message in a folder
• ‘delete’: Delete the current message

So, when you’ve gotten off of a plane or left a meeting and you want to get caught up on your email, there’s no need to open a message, close it and navigate to the next one. All you need to do is open the first message then press the ‘u’ button repeatedly until you’ve read all of the unread messages.

I remember reading a comparison between BlackBerry and Windows Mobile and the reviewer complained about how ‘hard’ it was to press the ‘alt’ key to type a period at the end of every sentence. When typing any text on a BlackBerry, you can always press the space bar twice in succession to enter a period. When you press the key combination, the BlackBerry replaces the two spaces with a period and a space.  Makes it a lot easier, eh?

There are a lot more of them, you can find a good article (and a lot more shortcuts) at http://crackberry.com/blackberry-101-beginners-guide-keyboard-shortcuts.