Blackjack II
Saturday, March 29th, 2008
Recently I upgraded phones again, this time the blackjackII. The quick review on this is that the battery life is more than acceptable for the type of phone that it is.. listening to an online radio station for 40min did show a bit on my battery meter, but a lot less than expected. Additionally, so far this has not felt sluggish in doing any task.
My “real” objectives with the phone are:
* Make/receive phone calls without hassle - so far so good
* Sync with my google calendar and be my PDA/scheduler
* Check mail for work and home
* Read blogs when waiting around at appointments
* General media player - share funny video clips & songs
* GPS (now that this phone has it) - see what’s around, especially when not in a car
My “want” list:
* GPS phone tracking so others can see my location (when I want them to)
The nice thing about where these phones are today is that software is inexpensive to add, and usually works quite well. Here’s what I’ve found so far.
Software for everyday use:
Facade - home screen with better scheduler view
PocketWeather - Weather for various cities.. works with Facade to display it all on 1 page
Phone Alarm - program to automatically go into quiet mode at night, also makes the alarms repeat
OggSync - Syncs to my google calendars
Opera Browser - Better than IE (nothing is as good as browsing on a PC)
Slingplayer Mobile - Watch my TV/cable from anywhere (must own slingbox for this to work)
Sprite Backup - Backs up your phone to a .exe on your storage card.. a MUST HAVE
zaTunnel - tunnel outgoing mail back to my server so it can send correctly
Google Maps - show where I am and where everything is near me, traffic, etc too
MS Live Search - Similar to google maps type of functionality
IMOV messenger - AIM/ICQ/Yahoo/etc, slightly better than the built-in versions
Fizz Bill Now - Split bills and figure out tips
Occasional use software:
GPS Test - Utility to show how well GPS is working, how many sats it can see, etc
GPSID Settings - Utility to make the GPS show on COM4
Keep Recordin’ - Utility to make recordings of any length (large wav files)
Minimo - Firefox for smartphones, sorry - IE and opera both work better on non-touchscreen models
PHM Registry editor - For those of us who like to change things we shouldn’t be playing with
PocketTV - Media player
