Review: Blackberry 8800

Ok I am taking a calculated risk here by reviewing my newest phone, the Blackberry 8800 from Cingular. The last two phones I reviewed like this I took back, the Treo 680, battery sucks, the Cingular 8525, the 3G reception in my area sucks (resulting in 10+ dropped calls a day). So with that being said I was torn about giving up the 8525, I love that phone, it is excellent and fast and a great device. But as I said it dropped way to many calls each day to even pretend to be a usable phone for me. ( Another employee at my office had the same problem, it is not so much the phone as the coverage in our area).

So I went in to the Cingular store in search of a better phone, with only 2.5G service on Cingulars EDGE network. And I walked out with a Blackberry 8800. This is my first Blackberry device, so I was nervous about how it would sync with my Mac, and how usable it would be.

Do I have to use MS Office on a Mac…

For many reason of late I have been wanting to use something other than MS Office on my Mac. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing wrong with the product and I do already own it, but still I have been having the yearning for something new and fresh. But what to use?

OpenOffice is a no go for me, it does not look nice at all. I have long been using Keynote over Powerpoint, so no problem there. Then we come to Excel, nice program, use it a lot. And I would like to use Tables exclusively, but it does not offer cell merging, so I use it as much as I can, it is a really nice looking program and does the basics well.

But what about Word? Well that is the big one isn’t it?

Have you heard this *ish about Safari?

Well I have, and I am talking about this. The post basically shows that Safari can significantly slow your system if it is left running, compared to Firefox, and well just about every other browser out there. According to these tests atleast.

I have always been and continue to be a fan of Safari, and though I do think that things like this are worth investigating, I do not have the time to do it. So I have switch my default browser to Firefox tonight ( in Safaris preferences) ( I will probably be back Safari, I am sorry). I am going to give this one of my good old fashioned real world tests and see if I notice any difference.

That is any difference without running timed tests and such. I am just going to use my computer as usual and see if it feels faster, slower, or the same. I really do not know what I am hoping for here. Like I said I love Safari, so I am hoping this is just a Safari hater out to make Digg. But I really do not think that to be the case. So I will give it a whirl.

Review: Airport Extreme Base Station

So my thirst for new toys has not stopped yet. I went out and got myself an Airport Extreme with all the hopes of sharing printers and hard drives all nice like. Well here is what happened when I went to set up the unit and my experiences thus far with it.

Setup up was a breeze no problems at all, I have never set up a router from Apple yet, but I have gone as far as installing DD-WRT on my Linksys router and setting this up. I found the setup easy, but it was not until I found the advanced user setup that I really felt comfortable with how the router was set up. You can find that under the menubar items.

The range is excellent I am using it in mixed mode and only with 802.11g on my Macbook Pro, no 802.11n devices here. But the range is about the same as I had with the Linksys and Linux firmware. That is even though I had bumped up the Linksys broadcast strength to something around 100mw. Interesting huh?

I got a new Macbook Pro, well sort of.

I am lucky enough to have a Father who really likes technology and gadgets, and really likes to have the latest and greatest stuff, as I also enjoy these things. The one thing that really sets myself and my Father apart in this area is money, he has the means to buy these things, which I cannot yet do. That being said last week he decided that is Macbook Pro 15 which he purchased in May of ‘06 (2.16ghz CoreDou 2gb RAM, 100gb 7200rpm HD, 256mb VRAM, and so on) was to old and most importantly the HD was to small. So he ordered a new one, the best one they have with 3gb of RAM and the 200gb HD option.

When he originally purchased the Macbook Pro I was the one that convinced him to buy the 100gb 7200rpm HD instead of a larger capacity drive because I simply thought he would not need the capacity and the speed boost was worth the sacrifice. Well turns out he filled it, which precipitated the new purchase.

Vista on Mac update

Well it has been a few days now that i have been playing around with Vista Ultimate on my Mac Pro. I have been unable to get a few things to work here and there and a couple of drivers are still not installed. But being as I have no real need for Windows these are not as much an issue as an annoyance to me.

I put Vista on my Mac for a few reasons, to play with the new OS from MS, to play video games, and to have access to IE for those times that a website forces you to use it. I also have a copy of parallels ready to go and am waiting for Parallels to have boot camp support for Vista.

Installing and Using Vista on Mac Pro

I got my copy of Windows Vista Ultimate (because though I hate Windows, I was taught that you must atleast try something before you judge it) and I installed Vista using Boot Camp on my Mac Pro. (Mac Pro 2.66ghz 3gb Ram). I allocated 60gb for Vista so that I could really use it if I wanted to for any reason.

It installed fast and easy. Everything seemed to work except for the eject key on my Apple keyboard…oh well. I tried to install the boot camp drivers from the CD but alas as I had read on the blogs it does not work with Vista. I tried the approach of decompressing the MSI and installing manually but have yet to have the patience to get everything installed. And if you are wondering launching Explorer and right clicking on the CD and selecting eject, does indeed eject the CD (until you can get to button mapped).

Overall I have to admit Vista seems very fast on my Mac, really snappy. Though not any snappier than OS X does, but certainly faster than XP pro computers I have used.

Parallels and Ubuntu

Well I finally got my copy of Parallels Desktop for Mac, and installed it, quickly upgraded to the beta version and off I went. But unlike most people I did NOT install Windows of any kind. I already haver Visa on my Mac Pro running on Boot Camp and since Parallels does not support using a Boot Camp partition with Vista yet, I moved on to other things. Truth be told I have found no need for any operating system other than Mac OS X for over a year now, I have always found a way to do things and open things that supposedly only worked on Windows, and steered clear of those that have no work around.

So I was faced with what to install on Parallels while I waited for Vista Boot Camp support. I chose Linux, Ubuntu 6.10 to be exact, why? Why not. It has been 2 years since I last played with Linux and I wanted to see what had changed and how it ran under Parallels. I know nothing about Linux. So it is all new for me.

I quickly ran into some problems though…