On Thu, 11 Jun 2009, J Cruit wrote:

> Sorry to send a flame post and never follow back up again but work has 
> been crazy.  Blackberry to me has always been a very functional and easy 
> to use system once you get used to it.  It doesn't have all the billions 
> of apps that the iPhone has but it does have a good number that I love 
> and work for me including the track my blackberries GPS location, remote 
> wipe, remote listen (nice for spying), remote make a loud noise so I can 
> find it, and tonnes of other fun apps.  The bold now gives us a decent 
> camera (with flash, take that iPhone!) and easy multimedia (just copy 
> mp3s over to the drive that pops up).  It isn't easily managed in Linux 
> but 95% of things can be done OTA, the last remaining hold out is 
> upgrading the OS.

Those are some pretty cool features.  Palm Pre has a flash for the camera 
and it has remote wipe (they tell me), but I'm not sure about some of 
those other cool ideas like remote loud noise, remote listen, tracking GPS 
(it has GPS but I don't know about accessing it remotely, though it 
might do that).

When I plug the Pre into USB to a computer, it pops up three options: 
"sync," "USB drive" and "just charge".  It charges itself while it is 
plugged in.  If I choose USB drive, it becomes an ordinary USB drive while 
it is charging.  While it was a USB drive, I made a directory called 
"Music", copied some MP3 directories into it, and when I went back to 
normal Pre use, the music player had detected all the files and indexed 
them.  That was easy.  It didn't find all of the album covers though -- 
something to work on.

This competition between developer teams will be very good for us!

The Pre has fairly poor battery life.  You will have to charge it every 
night.


> Plus on the security factor the full central management of the system 
> including remote policy push for passwords, locking and all that fun 
> stuff is cool.  Plus the entire disk is encrypted unlike the iphone 
> where not only is it not able to be fully encrypted but we can fairly 
> easily break into the file system even on a password protected unit and 
> wipe out whatever we want (including the password file :) ).
>
> So I think from a security factor right now Blackberry wins, I really 
> want to try out the PamPre and see how it stacks up from a security 
> point of view.

The Blackberry sounds pretty cool in that regard, at least.  Let us know 
what you find out about the Pre.  I have no idea about the encryption 
issues on the Pre.

Mike