Tech at Play

I finally got my own BlackBerry Bold last night – weeks after it was actually launched in Singapore.  It’s a long story, but suffice to say Kok Sen from RIM found it rather amusing when the friends I encouraged to go for the BlackBerry Bold got their units before me.

Anyway, click on the link below for more pictures and setup observations.

Nice. Having worked for a couple of years a packaging company, I sure can appreciate the functional elegance of the packaging here.  Note the additional piece of sponge used to protect the Bold within the box.

I thought it interesting that while the BlacKBerry Bold itself was labeled as “Made in Hungary”, other components, including the Lithium-ion cell and various adapters are made in China.  Anyway, I put everything back after fishing the battery out – since I already have a number of mini-USB chargers.  I won’t be looking at the manual as well.

Oh!  I just noticed that my BlackBerry Bold comes with a free memory card already loaded into the device.  Wait a minute, not ANOTHER small (1GB) card!  Sigh…

The following photo should give you a better understanding of my exsperation here.  The 8GB one cames from my retiring BlackBerry Curve, and will be going into the Bold.

Next, I logged into the server that runs my BlackBerry Professional Software. And yes, RIM has made a one-user setup completely free.  It is hidden deep within RIM’s website though, so for your reference, you can download BlackBerry Professional Software Express here.

Here you can see BlackBerry Manager 4.1 loading.  From the administrative console later, I assigned a new activation password for account before setting it to “reload”.

Going back to my BlackBerry Bold, I did an “Enterprise Activation” using my email address and password.  There’s all I need to do to get the various old emails and contact information synced to the new Bold. The actual activation took almost an hour I think – I turned in for the night while it was still running.  But what a surprise when I saw it this morning.

Now, I fully expected to see my last 1,000 emails or so to auto-magically appear, as with calendar entries, todos, notes and contacts.  However, it was a really nice surprise when I realized ALL my text messages (SMS) were wirelessly restored too.  Even call logs and previously saved Wi-Fi access points were there as with all valid system configurations from my BlackBerry Curve!

Cool huh.  And herein lies the crucial differentiator between a BlackBerry and the “rest” of the Smartphones on the market – even the iPhone: The end-to-end experience of a BlackBerry is superior due to the company’s impeccably attention to details and implementation.  And mind you, I say this after having used various Windows Mobile devices for a number of years, as well as a number of other PDAs such as a PalmPilot and now-defunct Psion Series 5.

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