I recently got my hands on an iPad.  I’ll be the first to admit I thought the iPad was kind of stupid.  After all it’s just a big iPod Touch or a big iPhone without the phone.  Then I played with one and got to thinking this isn’t so bad.

Well after a couple days of living with it, it’s pretty darn useful.  It’s sleek, lightweight, good battery life, and fairly usable.  eMail is good if you like email the Apple way.

For a 1.0 product it aint too shabby.

I highly suspect some useful improvements in the coming releases.

* Multi-tasking is a must have for this.  While most apps are good at letting you pick up where you left off, when you need to bounce around to collect some info for an email, it’s kind of tough. 

* The keyboard is surprisingly useful, although it’s not real well thought out.  You don’t need to type much to figure out some symbols are hard to get too.

* Editing a wiki with html like source is darn near impossible for example.   Yeah, I can use an Apple BT keyboard, but I need more control with that keyboard.  Maybe an apple keyboard driver to make the function buttons do stuff will help.

As for a multi-media device, this thing is pretty sick.  Great at browsing the web, and playing tunes, movies and TV.

In that regard the iPad is about 100x more useful than a netbook.

It’s strengths are simply:

* a Good web browsing experience, even if it is Safari-Lite

* email, the email integration is good and when iPhone OS 4.0 features come to this and you get a unified inbox, I’m sure it will get better.

* Lots of apps and games, some good ones are even free.

* of course it’s an iPod so it’s got your music.

* TV and Movies.

The biggest gotcha with using this is that you feel like you’re at an amusement park.  Meaning every time you turn around there is something that’s going to cost you money.  Very little added value is FREE.

Good apps cost money.  Out of the box I had to drop $30 on pages/numbers/keynote.  Another $20 on a good pdf viewer and a utility to be able to copy files over the airwaves.

This thing is good at video, but where do you get video? iTunes of course.  Which means $$$.

You can use the ABC app to watch ABC video online, but that assumes you have a connection, you may not, and you’ll be forced to watch commercials.

I frequently grab TV shows I miss, in torrent form and put them on my media server at home to watch.  I’d like to do the same here.  But as we know that’s not easy or fast.   First you have to download them and none are in apple format.  So then you have to ‘rip’ them.  That takes time and resources.  Then copy them again into iTunes. 

Here’s where things bother me. 

I pay roughly $100 a month for digital cable, with DVR.  I can watch and record what I want when I want it (and pretty much skip commercials).

That works out to $3.33 per day.  

Or in iTunes pricing la-la land, at $1.99 a show (plus tax) = $2.13 per episode, that allows me to buy 47 episodes or 11 shows per week.  (If I want to do without cable).

That might seem like a reasonable value, but when I consider that I can’t really get everything on iTunes.  (Most sports aren’t there and they certainly aren’t live), that narrows the selections of what I can use this for.  Basically just TV shows and select movies.

Let’s just say there are (3) shows I don’t want to miss.

Those 3 shows together add up to: $139.97 plus tax.   That’s entirely too much.

Realistically, I’d plunk down:

$10 for a season of each or $30 total to be able to watch them in Hi-Def any time I wanted without a connection needed (meaning I’ve downloaded it locally) and without commercials.  That’s more realistic to me.

So in the interim, until pricing gets reasonable, I guess I’ll have to do the download, and rip solution.  In which case they get $0…

The same thing goes for movies. 

$19.99 plus tax is entirely too much for a digital copy.

$5.00 is acceptable, just saying.

This certainly means I’m all over the place and being able to listen to a consistent signal or station is a good thing.

XM is pretty consistent on the highways, but when you’re in the mountains (which is where we prefer to ride) it can be spotty.  Especially when you’re on the north east side of the mountain.

So, being that I live in the North East, motorcycling unfortunately isn’t a year round event.   From sometime in November to at least the end of February, with a few exceptions the bike gets put away. 

Every year I call up XM, explain to them that I don’t need the service until March.  They threaten me with re-activation fees but when I persist they have usually discounted those months.  Enough so that it’s still worth it for that rare winter day around here when it hits 50 degrees and we go out for a ride.

Since the XM/Sirius merger, there isn’t any competition.  You can’t play one off the other any more.

I picked up my bill this year to start the negotiating process that happens every winter. Only to come to a few new realizations that really bothered me.

I remember last year being promised the price wouldn’t change for, I *think* 3 years. 

So what’s the strategy?  We didn’t raise our prices, but we now have to charge you a music royalty fee.  WTF?

This irritates me.

I *may* not even listen to music, in fact I generally listen to sports, or the comedy channel.  Their 80’s channel only has 100 songs, if you ride a 12 hour ride you will hear all of them, often twice.

I’m not against the artists being paid, but I am against XM billing me for a line item that is simply part of their cost of doing business.

Very few industries can do this.   I don’t patronize car repair places that charge me a line item ‘rag-fee’ or ‘fluid disposal fee’, and I likely won’t patronize XM any more.

I also get dinged $2.00 so they can send me an invoice.  I’m perfectly happy to receive this digitally, but no, I’m not going to let them auto-charge me for anything.   When they auto-charged my credit card in years past they couldn’t seem to charge me the same amount twice (even though my subscription didn’t change)

This year, they have a new feature.  I am apparently not alone.  They now let you suspend your account.  So that later you don’t have to be threatened with re-activation fees.  They also get to continue to list you as one of their ‘subscribers’ albeit a suspended one.

So for now I’m a suspended subscriber.  Helping to dilute your royalty fees.  I expect that will remain until I just have to have it for a big trip.

We’ll see.

It’s in your best interest to make sure the ‘try’ part works.

We’re re-evaluating centralized Anti-virus and would really like to evaluate AVG’s Network offerings, but it’s proving to be harder than it should be.

We’ve used Trend for the past couple years and it’s been OK.  Recently we’ve had a few things get by Trend and AVG Free has picked it up and dealt with it.  So we’re anxious to give it a look.

We’re Dell fans, especially latitude fans.  Super stable hardware.  We recently did a technology upgrade in our department and switched from the D-Series Latitudes to the e-Series.   We have a handful of e6500′s, a few 6400′s and a couple e4300′s.

For the most part this 1st generation of laptops has gone well.  Not perfect, but pretty good.  The e64/6500′s have seen a few BIOS upgrades that have worked out most of the issues.   The fingerprint reader/software combination (Dell Control Point) is still crap though.  Very unreliable.  Especially when compared the Wave fingerprint software that came bundled with an XPS that I own.

Outside of that they have been pretty good.

The e4300, not so much.

This little laptop is super sweet.  Nice small, fast, good battery life.  But we’re experiencing some hard hangs/freezes.   We’ve tried multiple flavors of OS’s, multiple driver combinations, all with little success.   We’ve also replaced the motherboard in one unit.  The problem persists.

I realize these are relatively new, but it amazes us that a google search for this issue returns nada.  Both laptops behave the same, random hard lock-ups.

It seems sleep/video/audio related, and no we can’t make it happen but it’s enough to send them back for the time being.

We’re working with our Dell rep and hopefully someone from the Brand Team to get to a resolution.  We really want them to work and be stable.  There isn’t another laptop out there that $ for $, feature for feature meets the need.

So if you’ve experienced similar issues I’m interested in hearing from you.

Post a comment and we’ll get in touch.

UPDATE

On Friday the 19th I had a conversation with a Latitude Brand  Manager.  He assured me that this problem is well known, especially with e4300′s running Vista.  A BIOS updated to address this specific freezing issue is in the works and slated to be released on the 29th.

We’re going to hang tight until then.   If this is known inside Dell, and being worked on.  The fact that none fo the Tier 2/Tier 3 Support people had any clue is somewhat bothersome.   We’ll report back if the fix does what it’s supposed to.

One needs only to look at the economic crisis on Wall Street, banking, big business, retail and the automotive industry.  All of these industries are filled with MBA’s and folks who should know what they are doing.  They are supposed to be smart, right?

• I know a person with a Masters in Computer Science who also holds an MBA and that literally couldn’t change a toner cartridge in a printer without help.
  (Yes I know they can be complicated, but damn, the instructions are pretty clear on the bag that the toner comes in).

The item that really got my goat today can be found here in the article written on November 28th entitled "You Can Support Headcount and Share of Voice on a Tight Budget" by one; "Alan See", Marketing Genius and MBA.

In this ~750 word article, the marketing genius would try to convince you that during these tough economic times you can "Do more with less" and by doing so you can still build sales leads and retain head count.

On the surface the article looks pretty good.  No, it’s not real deep, not a lot of marketing material is deep.

But the reality is this article spins and skews what went down during this "engagement" in a way that is almost criminal.

"the company increased qualified leads by 7 percent while cutting the budget by 24 percent. The decrease in spending was not the result of reducing headcount. During the campaign, the sales force set three consecutive monthly sales records, as well as three consecutive quarterly sales records."

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? 

Who wouldn’t want to hire a guy who could increase your sales leads 7%, set sales records, cut your budget and allow you to retain staff during these tough economical times?  Oh, and while he’s at it, single handedly increase your "share of voice".

So that’s the spun version of what happened at this "engagement", and as you know there’s almost always two sides to every story.

I’ll try to keep this simple so those with MBA’s can keep up.

Suppose you run a lemonade stand.

Your basic costs include: Water, Ice, Lemons and cups. 

Your primary method for advertising includes:

• Word of mouth (Brand X, our lemonade is delicious)
• Print advertising (Direct, local market advertising, perhaps leveraging coupons to reach your market).
• Direct Customer marketing, via email or snail mail.  (Hey Joe, you’ve enjoyed our Lemon aide in the past, you should try our new pink Lemon Aid)

You’re trying to grow your business so you hire engage a marketing genius.

This new guy has lots of great ideas for focusing your marketing. 

• Fewer Tasters, More Buyers (Marketing term: higher quality leads)
  Specifically he wants to reduce the number of ‘shoppers or tasters’ so that you use fewer resources sampling your products (cost savings). 
  (Bear in mind that tasters and samplers aren’t a burden, and history has clearly shown that the more people you have tasting your product the more people buy)
• Stop/Slow Direct Marketing (decrease the spend, save the headcount)
  Stop doing what you’re good at.  Stop that local or direct marketing that has worked so well in the past.  Stop inviting new and current customers to taste your new flavors, that might waste your time.
• Use Smoke and Mirrors (Marketing term: proclaim yourself thought leaders)
  Instead of spending your hard earned marketing dollars to generate leads (tasters of your product).  Spend it on a thought leadership piece, to educate the market on organic lemon farming, water filtration.  The things that help to make good lemonade.  Nothing directly related to your specific product, just over-all feel good, brand awareness marketing. 
• Get on the Web 2.0 bandwagon (Marketing term: leverage social networks)
  The value proposition here is still debatable.  This too is feel-good marketing.  Being where your customers expect to see you.  Nothing wrong with this just, but be mindful of the time you spend doing it and the ripples that come from it.

There is nothing wrong with thought leadership marketing.  It’s generally a good thing.  But it’s the type of marketing you do "in addition to" what has made you successful in the past, not "instead of".

The problem comes in when you cut your marketing spending on your bread and butter marketing and focus all your internal resources on the other.

What you don’t read about in Mr. See’s article is the flat spin he put the company in by neglecting the bread and butter marketing that the company lives on.

Three months of consecutive sales records?  That’s a true statement that had absolutely nothing to do with his efforts to ‘reduce the spend and save the head count’.  
It’s completely unrelated. 

Did any of his work pay off?  Yes, in some ways it did.

It is true that the thought leadership piece did drive a few highly qualified prospects our way.  A few prospects closer to buying without wasting a lot of time tasting.  If we calculate the true cost of those leads, the cost would be considered astronomical.

In the process of this engagement we all learned a very valuable lesson.

Do what you’re good at, and do it well. Ignore the obvious and it will eventually catch up to you.

Thankfully I don’t have to use one.  But I did get to play with one at a Christmas gathering last weekend.

It was pathetically slow, slow switching applications, slow changing from portrait to landscape.

The clickable front, button simulator, was a nice touch.  But the Pearl like keyboard in vertical mode is horrible.

I hope Blackberry can fix these issues.   It will not replace my 8830, or my iPhone which is still a sub-par enterprise device.

So basically, everything you’ve read on the Internet is true.  This phone sure is pretty but its poorly executed.

                        

[Warning: Rant eminent]

The following is an account of our tale of woe using Cintas Document Storage for our offsite tape storage. 

Background:

We currently back up our infrastructure to tape in multiple ways.  Including but not limited to:

- Critical daily backups, these get rotated off-site daily.  There’s a box with these tapes that get’s swapped out with the vendor every morning exchanging the tapes from the previous nights backups and retrieving the tapes for the next days backups.  These tapes never leave their carriers.  The carriers are stored at the offsite facility and are never opened by them.

- Weekly archives, every weekend we backup all the critical stuff, plus the next level of things deemed necessary are backed up every weekend.   These go off-site in bulk about 2x a month.   These tapes also live in a storage container and are never touched by Cintas unless we move them to the archive pool.

- Archives, we also backup everything, full server bare metal restore, at a minimum monthly.  We also backup *most* workstations on a best effort basis nearly ever 60 days.   These also go offsite for bulk storage approximately monthly.  these tapes are handled by the vendor, they are removed from the travel containers and are slotted in storage racks.

Service:

A little over a year ago we contracted with Cintas Document Storage for off-site vaulted media storage and tape rotation.   The rotation part has always been acceptable.   The tape retrieval process has failed miserably.  While we have been fortunate enough not to need our tapes critically fast, we contracted with them to have this ability.

They use a web based application to ‘request’ tapes or items to be delivered the next business day during their run.   On multiple occasions (3x in one year) they have failed to service our tape retrieval requests in less than 5 days.

They have miss-slotted our tapes, and simply miss placed them.  They have also miss-placed our daily rotational containers…   All of these things are bad, very very bad.

A better solution comes along…

About two months ago we were contacted by a competitor.  Unfortunately for Cintas this sales person called on us while we were in the midst of a miss-placed tape container episode.   So we were certainly open to receiving a quote for services.

This competitor is just as secure, and is actually geographically 30 miles farther away.  Their cost for the same daily rotation and tape storage space was literally 1/2 the monthly cost of Cintas and they don’t have any of our other document storage or shredding business (yet).   This may be too good to be true, but it honestly can’t be any worse so we agreed to switch.

While signing the contracts we were warned by this vendor that Cintas would not play nice.   That they behave like 3 year olds when it comes to customers leaving them.  They flat out told us we’d have trouble retrieving our tapes.   Imagine that… 

Well silly us, we thought they’d be professional.

The following Monday we requested our archival tapes through the website.   We should receive these tapes the following day (Tuesday) per our contract.  Tuesday came; no tapes…   Wednesday came; no tapes…   Thursday came and the Jig was up… 

We had already started our daily rotation with the new company so it became clear to them that we were no longer going to be customers.

This is when all hell broke loose.

Nearly a week went by with no contact from Cintas, emails and voice mails were not returned.   Then out of the blue we get a phone call from the sales person attempting to save the account.  Something that should have taken place after any of thier tape handling failures.   Once it became clear that the account wasn’t to be saved they decided to play hard ball.   We received an invoice for 3 months of tape transportation and a year and half’s worth of storage  (discounted 50%).   Apparently I didn’t realize we had to give 90 days notice.  Fair enough.   I was not aware that their contract is so one-sided. 

They can drop you at any time for any reason.

You on the other hand, have to give them 90 days notice, and 30 days to resolve any issues.   So when they misplace your tapes as long as they get them to you within 30 days, they are off the hook for their poor service.   As a penalty for leaving them you still have to pay them 50% of the storage fees for the remainder of the contract.   (In our case another year and a half’s worth).

Given their repeated failures, I was not about to give them that.   Regardless of what the tapes were worth.  (We have and still have duplicate archives of nearly everything we’d need on site anyway). 

About two weeks ago they sent out another representative to try and salvage the account and discuss the ‘settlement’.  This obviously wasn’t going to go anywhere, but we agreed that we’d pay for 90 days of service (the notification period), provided one of those months was the current month.   We’d pay the transportation/delivery fees for this period and a final delivery charge, but we wouldn’t pay for vault storage past the 90 day window.   We reached an accord.   I now have checks on my desk for the 90 day period, and the previous monthly invoice. 

We’re ready and willing to exchange these checks for the hostages  (our tapes), but even that has proven to be difficult.  Again they are non-responsive to emails or voice mails.  I suspect it will happen, but I don’t know when.

My advice to you:

If you’re a Cintas document storage/vault customer, get out while the getting is good.   Review your contract, if it has clause 16 ‘SERVICE GUARANTEE AND TERMINATION’ you’ll need to be stealthy about getting your stuff back.   It appears even though they have you over a barrel contract wise, they think nothing of going Al Queda on you and keeping your stuff hostage.

Yes they will loose our other business, and that’s a damn shame.

It gets better…

As part of our settlement, we paid a Final delivery charge.  I just spent the last day and a half trying to arrange this final delivery (basically the exchange of the hostages for the ransom money).  I was just informed that:

“Apparently they trust their drivers with our entire business on our tapes, but they don’t trust their drivers with a couple of checks of their money.”

Because of this, we’ve apparently agreed to pickup the tapes.  I don’t think so… It’s the principle of the exchange and the fact that they charged us for final delivery.

As of right now their supposed to do the deal tomorrow.   I’ve never, ever dealt with a company (or manager in charge) that was so full of excuses for not doing their job.   Since they can’t commit on a time, they are to give us a call 20-30 minutes before they head over.  I highly suspect that won’t happen either.

Final Result:

As expected, they didn’t call they just showed up, and as Murphy would have it we were at lunch.  We should have made them wait longer but in the interest of getting our tapes back we rushed through our lunch to get back within 15 minutes.   We have our tapes and they have their ransom monies.   All is now well with the world.

Again, I highly recommend that you avoid this particular part of the Cintas organization. 

Before you hit send on that next email, perhaps you should run down this list, just to be sure:

1. Is it going to just one person? (If yes, jump to #10)
2. Since it’s going to a group, have I thought about who is on my list?
3. Are they blind copied?
4. Did every person on the list really and truly opt in? Not like sort of, but really ask for it?
5. So that means that if I didn’t send it to them, they’d complain about not getting it?
6. See #5. If they wouldn’t complain, take them off!
7. That means, for example, that sending bulk email to a list of bloggers just cause they have blogs is not okay.
8. Aside: the definition of permission marketing: Anticipated, personal and relevant messages delivered to people who actually want to get them. Nowhere does it say anything about you and your needs as a sender. Probably none of my business, but I’m just letting you know how I feel. (And how your prospects feel).
9. Is the email from a real person? If it is, will hitting reply get a note back to that person? (if not, change it please).
10. Have I corresponded with this person before?
11. Really? They’ve written back? (if no, reconsider email).
12. If it is a cold-call email, and I’m sure it’s welcome, and I’m sure it’s not spam, then don’t apologize. If I need to apologize, then yes, it’s spam, and I’ll get the brand-hurt I deserve.
13. Am I angry? (If so, save as draft and come back to the note in one hour).
14. Could I do this note better with a phone call?
15. Am I blind-ccing my boss? If so, what will happen if the recipient finds out?
16. Is there anything in this email I don’t want the attorney general, the media or my boss seeing? (If so, hit delete).
17. Is any portion of the email in all caps? (If so, consider changing it.)
18. Is it in black type at a normal size?
19. Do I have my contact info at the bottom? (If not, consider adding it).
20. Have I included the line, "Please save the planet. Don’t print this email"? (If so, please delete the line and consider a job as a forest ranger or flight attendant).
21. Could this email be shorter?
22. Is there anyone copied on this email who could be left off the list?
23. Have I attached any files that are very big? (If so, google something like ‘send big files’ and consider your options.)
24. Have I attached any files that would work better in PDF format?
25. Are there any or other emoticons involved? (If so, reconsider).
26. Am I forwarding someone else’s mail? (If so, will they be happy when they find out?)
27. Am I forwarding something about religion (mine or someone else’s)? (If so, delete).
28. Am I forwarding something about a virus or worldwide charity effort or other potential hoax? (If so, visit snopes and check to see if it’s ‘actually true).
29. Did I hit ‘reply all’? If so, am I glad I did? Does every person on the list need to see it?
30. Am I quoting back the original text in a helpful way? (Sending an email that says, in its entirety, "yes," is not helpful).
31. If this email is to someone like Seth, did I check to make sure I know the difference between its and it’s? Just wondering.
32. If this is a press release, am I really sure that the recipient is going to be delighted to get it? Or am I taking advantage of the asymmetrical nature of email–free to send, expensive investment of time to read or delete?
33. Are there any little animated creatures in the footer of this email? Adorable kittens? Endangered species of any kind?
34. Bonus: Is there a long legal disclaimer at the bottom of my email? Why?
35. Bonus: Does the subject line make it easy to understand what’s to come and likely it will get filed properly?
36. If I had to pay 42 cents to send this email, would I?

The prize for the COD tournament was a signed Infinity Ward poster.  (whoopie)…

I understand this was Desctructoid’s first event.  Overall as a party goes it was pretty good.   There was a good group of folks playing Rock Band, a game I still don’t ‘get’.  Clearly sucking and looking stupid at Karaoke isn’t enough. At least with Rock Band you get to share the shame with 3 other people playing guitar and drums.   Some of the ‘bands’ were OK, at least they can push the buttons, but the singing, well, I should probably just stop here.

There was another station set up for people to play smash brothers.   Which to me was about as lame as it gets.  If I had shelled out $50 for that game I’d have to hurt someone.

There was a pre-release showing of a Ninja game.   Imagine the sword fighting of the Lord of the Rings PS3 games or Prince of Persia, mixed with the run around task based game Assassins Creed, only not as good and you’ve got this game.   I’ll certainly pass on that release.

The COD tourney was somewhat of a joke.  Very unorganized, and I’m sorry to say, you need sound to play that game.  That wasn’t possible hooked up to the big screens above the bar.

This review may sound negative and perhaps it is.  But the party was a blast and I’m sure it will only be better next time. 

Wh00t!

We have approximately 12 Blackberries from various carriers using our Blackberry Enterprise server.

About once a month one of them will just stop working.  Typically this is usually a device over seas or a device that one of our guys who travels over seas uses.  He’ll make a call to his provider (T-Mobile) to change his plan to something over seas and the break his data package nearly every time.

The conversation usually goes like this:

Salesperson: Is BES working?  I haven’t gotten email in a couple days.
Us: Yes, all 11 other phones are currently working and show activity as recent as a minute ago.  What did you do?
Salesperson: I called (T-Mobile) and asked them to change my plan for international use.
Us: call them back and have then fix your stuff.

Today was special though.  Another user who’s carrier is Cincinnati Bell (ATT under the covers regardless of what the tech support m0m0 tells you) called.

User: I messed up my Blackberry, can you re-activate me?
Us: What did you do?
User: I installed Blackberry desktop manager at home to sync my contacts at home too.
Us: That’s a bad idea, wipe the device and reactivate your password is xxxx.

A few hours later:

User: It won’t activate.
Us: After poking around on the BES server we can’t see any reason why it shouldn’t work.    Let’s call your carrier.

Placing call to carrier…

Tech Support:  How may we help you?
Us: A user jacked up his Blackberry and we’re trying to figure out why it won’t re-activate.  Can you look and see if there have been any changes?
Tech Support:  Why yes, I see we changed your account 48 hours ago.  The BES plan is now $20 more than the Consumer plan so we changed you to the consumer plan.
Us: WTF?  So when were you going to let us know this happened?
Tech Support:  I don’t know if they are going to send a letter out or not.
Us:  So 6 months ago we purchased the phone and told you we were going to use it with BES and you sold me a $30 unlimited plan.  Who made the decision to simply disconnect us from our company server?  Who there thought, Oh, this user doesn’t need the corporate package?  Let’s just cut them off at the knees.
Tech Support:  Let me transfer you to someone that can help.
Tech Support 2:  So I understand you’re unhappy about the price change?
Us: No, what I’m unhappy about is that you just broke my connectivity to my employer without warning.  That you made me look stupid to IT because I thought I may have jacked up my phone, or that their stuff was broken.   What I’m upset about is that I’ve spent quite a few hours figuring out how I might have done this, and IT has spent time looking into a problem that isn’t theirs.
Tech Support 2:  I understand, I can reactivate your corporate package, and offer you a $20 credit for 6 months will that help? 
Us: Yes that will help.

The price increase doesn’t bother me, most corporate data plans are around $50 a month.  What bothers me is that these fine folks couldn’t plan ahead 30 days and warn the user that the cost will go up unless they choose otherwise.   Instead they decided for this user that they no longer wanted/needed the package and defaulted him to a package that for the same cost did absolutely nothing for them.

Thanks, Cincinnati Bell Wireless.

What’s a Linked In Whore?  Where do I find one?   Are they cheap?  Just what will they do for money or a connection?

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past couple years.  Linked In was one of the first online contact managers/social networks.  Probably not the first, but certainly one of the better, and one of the first to embrace Web 2.0 stuff.   So it’s kind of like FaceBook Lite, without all the touchy feely “Come be my friend stuff” and about 11 million times more professional than MySpace.

It’s supposed to be more professional, more business like.   Store your contacts online, see who they know, etc, etc.  Through these connections you can ask to be introduced to your connections, connections.  If you’re in public relations or sales this is probably a good thing.   They do try to protect you though.  Just because you can see my connections doesn’t mean you can contact them.   Instead you have to ask me to be introduced.  You get to play match maker.  Instead of going up to the woman in the bar and asking her out, you have to ask a friend to introduce you.  Again this is generally good because it’s on the Internet and you don’t know these people, it’s also virtual, so you can’t turn them down directly or slap them if it’s appropriate.  So a referral is generally welcome.  But Linked In whores are screwing this all up.  They’ll introduce anyone to anyone.

My 115 legit connections link me to 730,400 other professionals and I’m not sure that’s a good thing.  It might be a good thing if I were selling something directly, or in the job market.  Otherwise not so good.

For the record I submit if you have: (500 or more connections) you’re a Linked In Whore.

This means you’ll link to anyone just for asking.  You have no scruples.  (You’re also likely to be a recruiter which only validates that you have no scruples).  I also proclaim that if you have 500+ connections you don’t know most of them, and couldn’t recognize them if you saw them.  No way no how.   So why are you connected to them?  Why am I connected to you? 

Of my 115 connections I’ve personally met probably 110 of them.  In fact that’s one of my personal criteria for linking with someone.  I’m sure I have a few (less than a dozen) with whom I’m only vaguely familiar with.   What value is there to having them on my list?  I’ve probably done business with them or may want their opinion on something, some technology, or maybe some person some day.  Everyone else is out.

All my bad Linked In experiences come from Linked in Whores.  Generally connections to them, like a bad STD, they just want to spread.  They want me to introduce them to my connections and I don’t know who they are.   Just because they are connected to someone they must be good right?  Uh, no, especially when their a whore connected to another whore.

The biggest epiphany for me came from Sales people using Linked In.  (Generally also connection whores).  These typically seem to be those those that I’ve met in the past, or one of their co-workers.  If I’m not a customer now, what makes you think that just because you’ve found a way to be connected to me via a group or other connection that I want to buy stuff from you now?   I don’t.  I don’t like cold calls, I don’t like solicitations for business.  I don’t want that through Linked In.  Linked In for me is a network of people I trust.  I submit that nobody knows and fully trusts and respects 500+ people.  Not for any length of time.  Not really.

If I were Internet Czar, I’d make these connections expire.  If you haven’t contacted me and I haven’t contacted you in 6 months to a year, then I don’t really know you, don’t do business with you and probably don’t need you.  But more importantly I don’t need you or any of your connections trying to sell me stuff.   Maybe they don’t really go away, but they go into a “Time-Out” state where they can see my connections, but none of their connections can see my connections.  I *might* need them someday, that’s why I probably Linked to then in the first place.  

If you find yourself in job seeking mode you can ask your connections to hook you up again or take you out of “Time-Out”.   Yeah, that would help out a lot.

The Internet is full of wonderful stuff, but as with anything else in life it only takes a few to screw it up for the rest of us.

Granted the software is still beta, and I’ll try not to beat it up based upon that, but I will expose some of the issues that may or may not be a problem for switching from a CrackBerry to iPhone.

First some clear facts:

1. Edge simply blows.  It’s too slow for this.  Things are good when on Wifi, but edge…  Not good.  (3G should fix this right?)
2. The Microsoft Active Sync stuff leaves a little to be desired.  If your organization really leverages the security and lock down aspects of Black Berry Enterprise server you may have a hard time convincing them to let you do this.  (I’ve played with ActiveSync in the past with WinMobile phones and it’s been better than it currently is on the iPhone.  Again, it’s still Beta so we’ll see).
3. I have not tried to nuke the phone remotely from the Exchange console.  I will try that later this week.

First things first, it works, or will work at some level.  If you’ve totally been brainwashed into the BlackBerry messaging management then you probably aren’t going to like the way Apple, the iPhone, and ActiveSync work.  Simply provide your account details, and viola, your contacts, cal and mail are synchronized as it should be.

Email:

Blackberry sort of consolidates all your inbox messages if you so choose (and I do).  Meaning messages that are filtered and put into other folders by default are still in my messages application on the BlackBerry if I choose to sync those underlying folders.   With ActiveSync you only get notified of new items in the inbox.   This could be bad if you organize your inbox as I do.

If I wanted to know about new MGMT_Meeting emails which are filtered into that folder, I won’t know unless I look there.  That folder isn’t initially sync’d until you open it.

Mail works and is beautifully rendered as you’d expect.

It doesn’t appear to support landscape mode which kind of sucks for some emails.

Beta Warning: So far email notification has been spotty at best.  There are times I’ll open mail and the last updated time will be hours behind the actual time.  The mail app hangs a lot.  Generally 2-5x a day I’ll need to hard boot the phone.  It handles some attachments well; Excel, Word, even Cisco Voice mail messages are playable, others, not so much.  I have a couple attachments that will hang the phone in a really bad way, one is a pretty simple PDF.

Contacts:

Contacts work just as you’d expect them too.  Create contacts in Outlook and they magically appear on the iPhone with full details including the photo.

This is the most stable part of all of it at this time.  I have no complaints or issues to point out here.

Calendar:

This is where things get quite fugly.  First, you end up with a second Calendar.  One which can still by synchronized with iCal, and another that goes with ActiveSync.  While you can turn off the iCal synchronization within iTunes I haven’t found a way to delete it from the phone.  As a result you end up with two calendars without visual clue as to which one is which.  You can pick which one is the default, but again, it’s not immediately clear which one is which.

1. There is no week view.
2. Meeting invites work provided you’re the one invited.  Standard Exchange/Outlook responses are:  Accept, Decline, Tentative.   Apple however chose; Accept, Decline, Maybe…
   
3. There’s no facility to invite someone when creating a meeting or scheduled item (I hope this gets fixed).
   

Last but not least is the keyboard.  Nope, it’s not tactile, no you really can’t two-thumb type worth a damn (at least I can’t yet) and the predictive text will bite you when you least expect it but it’s pretty good otherwise.  I suspect that a good portion of Blackberry users primarily ‘read’ and don’t respond to anything in detail.  If you’re that type you will be just fine.  It takes some getting used too and touch is a big thing.   It took me quite a while to adjust to the Blackberry’s lack of touch screen when coming from a Palm even though it had a keyboard, I still used the touch screen a lot.  After using the iPhone I again found myself wanting to touch the icons on the Blackberry.  If there is an adaptation of Graffiti for the iPhone that would rock as well.

So all in all this looks very promising.   The data speed has to improve, reliability has to improve.   The email management will force me into a different email organization paradigm but I could probably work that out.   It is a straight forward shift from the Blackberry to iPhone?  No.  But I think this will make a lot of people happy in the long run.  As of now the Beta stuff is getting better,  Beta 3 was more like Alpha 1 to me.  It was completely unusable.  Beta 4 is much better but still not usable enough.  I still have to carry the Blackberry.

More later as things progress.