So I’ve got the Blackberry back. It turns out the old one did not survive enough for data transfer; I tried hooking it up and the computer registered it as new hardware, but then the Desktop Manager refused to see it as connected. The latest backup I had was July 29th so I restored that one and at least I got most of my address book back. Thank goodness I’ve been using a Gmail account as my primary mobile address, so all of my emails are automatically backed up! I got the new Otterbox case installed right away, and I have a few bubbles but I’m not going to mess with them until I need to open up the case for some other reason. The membrane is a little hard to get used to, I’ve been making occasional typos on the keyboard, but it turns out “you can use your trackball through the membrane” means “there’s a little hole in the membrane so you’re using the trackball directly” which works fine. I don’t remember all the programs I had on the old one, but I can download them as I realize I don’t have them! The only one that might be an issue is Geocache Navigator, because I think that one is tied to your device’s PIN and mine is different now. I emailed them yesterday but I haven’t gotten a response yet.

FYI folks, I will not be accessible by mobile phone for a few days. My Blackberry Curve just got run over by a car. I was getting out of my car and I heard it fall but I didn’t see where it went. Spent 10 minutes looking all over. Then spotted it…in the middle of the street. Where cars had been whizzing by for 10 minutes. It definitely didn’t survive. I am still in shock. So yeah, I won’t have a phone for a few days. Just ordered a new one on eBay but it will take at least a couple of days to get here. What a pain in the ass accident.

Not that anybody should actually care, but I got the red skin. Only 5 people liked that, and 12 people preferred the pink one, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted elegant this time around. kdlb, gretchen_marie, serijules, and sunnydale47 all gave great reasons for choosing the pink one, and my wife preferred that one too. But I said “okay, I’ll get the pink one” and then proceeded to look back at some other ones. :A: said, “why don’t you get the one YOU want instead of what everybody else wants?” So red it was. Who knows, I’ll probably hate it and get a pink one, or try to put the old one back on again. (The reason for getting the new one is supposedly because the old one didn’t transfer perfectly to the new housing…I would say about 35% because it didn’t transfer right and 65% because I just want a new one.)

Of course, if DecalGirl had made this or this or even this into a Curve skin, it wouldn’t have been an issue. I just wanted something pink AND elegant, but they didn’t have it. I might even have gone with this for simplicity’s sake. It was $8.17 vs. $21 for a fully custom MyTego skin, so…yeah. It is what it is.

I finally fixed the issue with my phone. I have no idea what the problem was, but I fixed it. I completely disassembled my phone (turned out to need T5 and T6 drivers), blew on the camera a lot, and put it all back together…mostly. It doesn’t quite all snap together right anymore, and I’m not sure why. I might ask a friend if he can take a look at it; I’m also considering buying a new housing off eBay in case some of the clips got broken off, and that’s what’s keeping it from snapping together. But I put it back in my broken case, and as long as it’s in there, it’s fine. I think a rubberized skin might work too, but either way it’s not going to work with the holster I just bought for $8 shipped, which is designed for a case-less Curve. Sigh…it’s not perfect…but I fixed the camera!!

Added: This is exactly what I want. But $60?! Oh man, I sure do want it though…I got money in my PayPal account…hmm….

Tonight I went with my best friends to see Mamma Mia – the movie, not the play. I hadn’t been expecting to, but I found out this morning that they had already made plans, so I asked if I could join. The movie was cute, but damn, I really see why they say there is no plot to that thing. I was disappointed that the only reference to Fernando was a single line whistled by Meryl Streep – apparently it’s in the stage show, but they dropped it from the movie.

My phone case broke again…the day after I got the replacement. I have e-mailed Crackberry and I am asking for a store credit or refund so I can purchase an entirely different style. This one has just one point of contact, making it far too easy for it to break. Then again, I had this same single point of contact style with my Sidekick, and it never broke. But I want to buy a holster, and I’m hoping Crackberry will cut me a break here.

Halsted is doing a month of gratitude, and since tomorrow is the first of the month, I think I shall do it too.

My damn phone’s camera still doesn’t work. I’m really annoyed. I spent close to six hours tonight trying to fix it, and I ended up doing everything from upgrading to bricking to wiping to reloading and a whole lot in between. And the camera STILL doesn’t work. The only thing that’s different is I’m now on a slightly higher OS…I’m on .52 instead of .46, yippee. The camera is still funky and not saving pictures, everything it pretends to save is 2MB instead of 400k like it should be. The only thing I didn’t do is downgrade to 4.2 and then re-upgrade to 4.5, as that MIGHT be what fixed it last time, but I can’t be sure. I still love my phone, but I would love it a lot more if it had a working camera. I thought surely a wipe would do it, but I didn’t downgrade to 4.2 in the process, so maybe that’s why it didn’t help. I’m pretty confident it’s NOT a hardware problem, because I was able to fix this in the past, I just don’t know what I did. I think it was the 4.2 to 4.5 upgrade, so I might try that again, but I spent enough time on it tonight, I’m giving up until tomorrow at least. I miss my camera phone!

Here is the result of my Blackberry OS upgrade, which went beautifully.

That’s right, the new OS gives my Curve video capability. And the HTML emails aren’t too shabby either. I’m happy!

When I saw on BBCool that the Blackberry 8820 is about to be released, I got slightly worried. The article reported that the phone will combine GPS and wifi in one unit, which as far as I can tell is a first for Blackberry devices. If this phone had a camera, I would have been annoyed because it would be my dream phone – and I just bought my Curve 8310 for $330. But when I checked it out on Gizmodo, sure enough, no camera. A lot of commenters seemed to like that, saying that their employers don’t allow camera phones. Only one person pointed out that the Blackberry camera can be disabled at the enterprise level by administrators. I don’t want a phone without a camera; I first had one with my Color Sidekick (man that thing was crap) and I love it. In fact, the Curve’s camera is so good (2MP) that I haven’t used my regular camera since I got the phone – nothing I’ve taken a picture of has been that important. So even though the 8820 will have both GPS and wifi, it’s not for me.

And neither is the upcoming Curve 8330. It doesn’t have wifi. What’s it take to get a quality smartphone with GPS, wifi, and camera?

I am making a real quick post from my new phone. To my amazement, AT&T actually came through with an unlock code – I thought for sure they wouldn’t. But they did! Unfortunately I had already given up on them and ordered another Curve, already unlocked, with the intention of returning this one. The seller said they were willing to mutually withdraw, but then checked their records and saw it was too late – it had already been shipped. Fortunately :A: isn’t killing me over it, she knows I’ll sell the other one when it gets here. Anyway, new phone! Ta-daaaaa.

I just bought a fancy new phone. A very fancy, state of the art, not crippled by T-Mobile, phone. I bought a Blackberry Curve 8310 in Titanium, and it is my dream phone. At first my wife said I absolutely couldn’t buy it, but she finally relented! Instead of getting me a PS2 for my birthday (she’s running a tad late on it), she is contributing the $90 cost of a PS2 to my purchase of the phone. I got an AT&T version off eBay, and you can buy unlock codes on eBay too, so I will be unlocking it and putting my T-Mobile SIM card into it.

My bill will go up by $5-15 when I switch to the Blackberry plan, because it doesn’t include unlimited texts like the Sidekick, so you have to pick the 400 ($5), 1000 ($10), or unlimited ($15) text plans. I got it on a trial basis, from a seller who accepts returns for any reason for 7 days. When I had the T-Mobile Dash a few months ago, I knew within a few days that I didn’t like it, so I think I will know for this, too. If I decide to keep it, I have to sell both my GPS device (there’s one in the phone) and my Sidekick 3 (don’t need two phones). It won’t be SUPER easy to do geocaching with the Blackberry – there’s no ideal application for it yet – but it is possible.

The phone has everything I want except WiFi, and I don’t really NEED that because I’ll have the unlimited data plan and I have cell coverage everywhere except my house. But we might be moving to my in-laws’ house soon (we are still house-sitting, but we are going to ask if we can stay in the spare room where we are now) so I don’t have to worry about it, they have cell coverage here.