Whatever I am interested in

If you live in indonesia, you will notice that there’s a blackberry hype really builds up among the society. Why? I’ll point it out later. You won’t believe how many sms / conversations started with “what’s your bb pin?”, “give me your bb pin” and what amazed me is people assumed that you are using blackberry nowadays.

Coming from me, who loves gadgets and technology, I’ve once used a blackberry in 2004/2005 for a couple of years and only because my work requires it. At that time, blackberry is only known to be used in work related stuff, you know, the push email , VPN accessibility, and nobody really cares about blackberry messenger (BBM) (well, we got other ways for messaging, such as MSN/YM/ICQ) but really, who would want to carry an ugly looking device as a phone (I remember those days when my friends make fun of it as a calculator rather than a phone). I can say I’m a fan of phones with keyboard and have been using these type until now, the iphone (even if it’s not physical button).

Here is the reasons of why blackberry are so popular in indonesia:

• the simple step needed to activate the service (here in indonesia, they let you activate by SMS or you can go to the provider store and activate through customer service), and what makes it even a better deal, there’s an option for daily, weekly and monthly, meaning you can deactivate and reactivate the service whenever you need it.

• once activated, there’s no other configurations needed. It’s always on as long as you are in the coverage area of the data networks, compare to nokia & other phones you need to enter some settings (some request by OTA) but still it’s considered troublesome for many.

• no email is needed for BBM to work, it already has a unique identification, called PIN burnt to it (as compared to other IM applications). You probably wouldn’t believe me if I tell you that many blackberry users here don’t even have an email, they don’t care about the email. The only thing they know is they can send messages to one another using BBM. One thing that always gave me a smile is the people think that they are not paying for the messages in BBM, this is always their reasoning, but actually you do pay for the service, remember?

• the price of the service is damn cheap, US$10-18/month for unlimited data (as long as you use within the blackberry itself and does not apply when you tethered the device for your laptop/desktop). As for the daily program, you can find as low as $0.50 (50 cents). BELIEVE IT.

Few releases of blackberry devices do have some improvement over its design, especially the blackberry 8900 (Javelin) and the recently announced Blackberry Tour, while the curve 8300 series still remain to be widely used and wanted for new blackberry users.

I won’t recommend to anyone to use a blackberry unless all they want to do with their mobile phone is to chat among friends and because there’s no significant improvement (or dare I say, any improvement at all) applied to the OS since I last used it, maybe the internet browser improved a bit on Bold/Javelin or maybe some may claimed the new BBM 5.0, but for everything else, get the iPhone 3Gs or Nokia.

It’s a simple trick for those who use multiple twitter account to quickly switch between accounts to post new tweet.

When you create a new tweet and notice that you want to use the other account, you can just tap the area where it mentioned “New tweet from @” (circled in the image below)

Then, you will be presented with the option of the accounts (shown below). You just tap on the account you want, then the new tweet will use the selected account instead.

In 3.0, it does seem strange at first when you send SMS with multiple recipients, the window show “Group MMS”. I never really bother about it (since none has ever complained) until one hour ago (as of this writing), a friend questioned me, why did I send a multimedia message when it only contains text?

After that, I tried sending a couple more to others just to confirm it, and yes, in 3.0, SMS with multiple recipients is being sent as a multimedia message.

Apple, you need to fix this A.S.A.P., release a patch (something like 3.0.1 for SMS fix), revert it back to what we had in 2.2.1.

Temporary solution: If you don’t use MMS, turn it off in Settings – Messages – MMS Messaging to OFF, then group sms will be sent out as sms.