Archive for October, 2008

Crunch

October 14, 2008

The credit crunch. I thought this was just a media invention until Lehman Brothers closed down. 

Then I started to read about sub-prime loans, NINAs and NINJAs, world savings of 70 trillion usd, and I realised that there was a housing bubble, and it just burst. 

There is a very informative and humorous piece at thislife.com called The Giant Pool Of Money. Go and read it or listen to the recording.

http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=355

Blackberry Pearl review

October 14, 2008

This phone is great! Just get one, it does everything. Well, almost everything. It’s a million times better than Windows phones. The brilliant predictive text software makes sure you don’t even notice you’re using a new half-qwerty style keyboard.

But I must complain anyway:

  • the email message system is a bit too ‘automatic’. By that I mean all received, sent and drafted emails are all in the same place: your inbox. Why they couldn’t have separate folders for sent and drafted email is beyond me. There is an SMS outbox but no email outbox. But there is a good customisable ’saved search’ function. So to see only mail you’ve sent, is as simple as typing alt-s, once you’ve set it up. If you don’t mind all that then its pretty cool because you can have your work and personal email, along with SMS, MMS, instant message conversations and saved web pages all in one list. 
  • you can’t easily save attachments. Well you can save the email they’re attached to, but not the individual files. There’s some commercial software called BeamBerry, of which I have a 10-day trial, but its says that .htm and .jpg are “unsupported types”. So it’s not really possible to organise your files like we’re used to doing in a graphical file explorer program.
  • I can’t figure out how to get the IMAP feature of synchronising ‘read message’ status from the phone to my web gmail account. Orange tell me it’s “not supported”. Maybe I can make my own IMAP proxy server that could do it!