Ricky Says

I feel obliged to reply to my own post title "Apple Drops iPhone Price to $199 and Converts Blackberry Fans", and let you know that I decided to actually stick with the Blackberry.

It turned out that I'm not eligible for the upgrade price because I bought my BB less than a year ago and signed up for a 2 year contract with AT&T. So the new iPhone 3G would have cost me $399 for the 8GB model and $499 for the 16GB model - and I just can't justify that much money for a phone and web browser.

Also, reports of the 3G's fast internet speed indicate that it comes at the price of battery life - spent in as little as 2 hours! I can easily go for 2 days on a single charge with my Curver, and I'm not enthused about the prospects of having to plug an iPhone in for charging every few hours.

Fortunately RIM will be releasing the Blackberry Bold very soon in 2008 and it claims to have 3G speed - so I'll keep my eyes on that one instead, and I still use my Curve around the clock for web browsing, email, texting, twitter, taking pictures, listening to music, and finding my location on Google maps.

So it's all still very good in Blackberry land, and I know you want one of those t-shirts ;-)

I've been doing a lot more travel lately for my new job then I'd like, and I'm getting pretty good at slimming down what I lug around in my laptop case. Every electronic gadget I bring adds a few ounces to my laptop case, and they each add up to a sore shoulder while rushing to catch connecting flights.

I do have a couple gadgets though that make it on the short list of "must haves", and a couple of them require AA batteries - a laser pointer/remote slide controller device that lets me advance to the next Powerpoint slide even if I'm on the opposite side of the room from my laptop, and a wireless optical mouse (the fewer the wires, the better).

I'd hate to be in front of a group of paying customers, only to discover that my batteries were dead, but I also don't want to carry around a battery charger or have extra batteries floating around my laptop case.

Enter the perfect solution: USB rechargeable batteries.

Question: I recently bought a new iPhone 3G and want to copy all my contacts from my old phone to the new phone. I have quite a few and don't want to have to type them each into the iPhone as it would take forever. Is there a faster way to do this?

Answer: Yes, there's a much faster way to do this by using your iPhone's ability to sync with your Outlook contacts. If you can download your old phone's contacts into Outlook, then you'll be able to sync them to your new iPhone using iTunes.

Here's what you'll need:

1. iTunes loaded on your computer (free from Apple).
2. USB data cable to connect your old phone to your computer.
3. Software to download contacts from your old phone to Outlook or Outlook Express (Windows Mail on Vista). DataPilot does a good job of this and works with all major phones, so I'll use it to demonstrate (download here and use coupon code ICJ0707 for $10 off retail).

Connect your old phone to your computer using a USB data cable and fire up DataPilot to handle the connection. Click the Read All button to load all of your phone's contacts.

Ever notice how Windows Explorer opens up to your Documents folder on Windows Vista? That's not usually where I want to start looking for files - I usually want to start at the root of my C: drive.

If you have a specific folder that you'd like Windows Explorer to always open to by default, then here's an easy change to make that happen.

First, find the menu or shortcut that you typically use for opening Windows Explorer. For most people that's going to be on the Start -- All Programs -- Accessories -- Windows Explorer menu.

For me - to make it easier to get to - I copied that menu to my taskbar by right-clicking the Windows explorer menu, selecting Copy, and then right-clicking on the taskbar and selecting Paste.

Once you find the menu or shortcut, then right-click it and select Properties

You'll be prompted with a Windows Explorer Properties dialog. In the Target field, enter the desired startup folder in double-quotes after explorer.exe. Be sure to leave a space between the folder location and explorer.exe.

Click OK, and the next time you select that menu or shortcut, Windows will open Explorer in that folder by default.

Question: I have My Portfolio set up at iGoogle and can see it fine on a PC. But when I go to iGoogle using my Blackberry it does not show up - everything else on the iGoogle home page I have does. How can I see My Portfolio? (I used to have it at my Excite homepage but they no longer offer that service of showing your personal portfolio.

Answer: The default web browser that comes with Blackberry mobile phones is just "ok", but not great. It doesn't do a very good job of showing complex web pages, and usually strips them down to a more mobile-friendly smaller screen size.

Opera has a web browser that's completely free called Opera Mini, that runs quite a bit better on a wide variety of phones. It lets you view web pages in full view, and let's you zoom in on the areas that you want to see.

Here's the iGoogle page in full screen view:

Notice the rectangle on the screen? That's the zoom viewfinder, and watch how it zooms into that area of the screen when I click the scroll button:

Question: I occasionally want to take a picture of my Blackberry screen to explain to friends or coworkers how to do something on the phone, or to show them what a game looks like. Is this possible?

Answer: Yes, it's possible to take screen shots of your Blackberry device using a free program called BBScreenShooter.

You can even take psuedo-video of your Blackberry screen with the BBScreenStream program that takes snapshots every half second or so in a continuous loop - similar to video surveillance cameras.

You'll need the javaloader.exe that comes with the Blackberry development kit, which you can get from Motorola. The dev kit is a huge download though, which seems overkill for just one file - so I stuffed it in my downloads folder and you can get JavaLoader.exe here without having to download the whole dev kit.

Place JavaLoader.exe and bbscreenshooter.exe in the same folder, and then double-click bbscreenshooter.exe to run the application.

Question: I'm a big fan of Motorola's PhoneTools software, and I've used it for a while on Windows XP to copy pictures from my phone to my PC. I recently upgraded to Vista though, and now PhoneTools won't recognize my phone. What's the trick to getting it to work?

Answer: I've also used PhoneTools for quite a while and would say it's my hands-down favorite program for connecting my wife's RAZR V3 phone to our laptop, so we can copy pictures and ring tones between the laptop and her phone (and vice versa).

I was able to get it running on Vista but first I had to download and install the Motorola USB Driver v3.5.0 for Windows (32-bit) to get it working on Vista.

Motorola makes you create an account, which always drives me nuts, so I downloaded it and saved it on my web server so at least you won't have to create an account. You can get the Vista RAZR drivers here without having to create an account.

Once you download and install the driver, then you'll be able to run PhoneTools and it will recognize your RAZR phone on Vista with a USB data cable or Bluetooth connection:

Question: How do I connect my Bluetooth wireless phone with my laptop, so that I can send and receive files?

Answer: Connecting your Bluetooth wireless phone with your laptop is called pairing, and I'll use a Blackberry Curve to show you how it works.

I'm assuming your laptop comes with a built-in Bluetooth adapter (or you can also get a Bluetooth adapter that plugs into one of your USB ports).

First make sure that Bluetooth is enabled on your phone. For Blackberry phones, that means selecting the "Set Up Bluetooth" application from the main screen, and then selecting "Enable Bluetooth" after clicking the menu button.

Next, set up your computer to allow Bluetooth connections. If your computer comes with Bluetooth, then you'll see a Bluetooth icon in your Control Panel (Start button -> Control Panel from Vista):

Double-click the Bluetooth icon and you'll see a Bluetooth Devices dialog. Click the Options tab and make sure the options to "Allow Bluetooth devices to find this computer" and "Allow Bluetooth devices to connect to this computer" are both checked

Question: "My cell phone lets me browse the web, so it seems I should be able to use that connection from my laptop. Is there a way to connect my laptop to the Internet using my cell phone?"

Answer: Yes, you can use your cell phone's internet connection to browse the web on your laptop, by connecting your cell phone to your laptop with a USB data cable and software that handles the connection(also known as "tethering").

What you need:

• A web-enabled cell phone with a data plan. If you can browse the web on your cell phone, then it's web-enabled, but you still need to have a data plan with your wireless service provider (e.g. AT&T) in order to use your cell phone as a tethered laptop modem.

• A USB data cable or a Bluetooth adapter. You'll use the USB data cable to connect/tether your cell phone to your computer, or the Bluetooth adapter to connect without any wires.
• Tethering software programs like DataConnect or Mobile PhoneTools Bluetooth that use your cell phone as a modem.

Tethering your cell phone to your laptop:

1. Connect your web-enabled cell phone to your laptop
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Question: Even though I have set up profiles for my Blackberry Curve phone, I still do not receive email messages when its on. The phone rings but not when I get email at any of the email addresses I have set up.

Can you help?

Answer: I had this problem a while back with my Blackberry Curve, and the solution was to resend the service books - something you can do from your Blackberry using it's built-in web browser, or from another computer using Internet Explorer or similar web browser.

Open the Blackberry website (https://att.blackberry.com/ for AT&T users) and log in with your blackberry account info. Click the "Service Books" link and then click the "Send Service Books" button.

If you are experiencing difficulties sending or receiving email from your BlackBerry device, sending service books to your device will usually take care of the problem.

Question: My wife and I are pay-as-you-go T-Mobile customers who have just found that the Razr V3 phones give us most of what we're looking for; however in trying to "rescue" some photos off our old phones to bring some shots we valued over to the new ones, I was told that we couldn't email the photos from our computer back to our new phones without signing up for some other service that our pay-as-you-go accounts didn't at this point provide.

Can you explain to me what they're talking about? (PS. I was able to save our old phone photos by putting our sim cards back into our old phones-one at a time-and sending the photos to each other's new phones, then swapping them with each other's new phones).

Answer: The service they're referring to is probably a data plan, which is what I also am required to have in order to email pictures with my AT&T plan. Transferring photos can be expensive though, with rates often running at 10 cents per kb of file size (meaning that even a small 100kb picture would cost you a dollar each time you transfer it).

An easier and free (well, free aside from the software) way to transfer pictures between a Razr phone and your computer is to use Motorola's PhoneTools software to transfer them using a USB data cable.

Question: I have some pictures I took with my Blackberry Curve that I'd like to copy over to my computer. How do I do this?

Answer: With Blackberry phones you have a few choices:

1. Transfer via email. This is the easiest way, and doesn't cost any money because data transfer is included in the Blackberry service. With the picture open on your Blackberry (Media -- Pictures -- My Pictures -- and then find your picture), press the menu button and select "Send As Email" (you have to scroll down a ways on the menu to find this option).

The email will show up on your computer with a file attachment containing your picture in jpg format, which is compatible with any photo imaging programs and will even open in Microsoft Paint (although I recommend a program like Paint.NET which is free and awesome).

The only drawback with the email approach is that you can only send one picture at a time, which gets a little tedious if you have several pictures you'd like to copy to your computer. In that case I recommend the USB data cable approach described below.

2. Transfer using bluetooth.

Question: My work laptop doesn't have any games on it, but I thought there were some cool games like chess and mahjong that came with Vista. Is there a way to turn them on or install them?

Answer: I think a lot of companies would rather their employees use their laptops for work instead of play, but I find that I'm more productive if I can play a game every once in a while during work hours :-)

Windows Vista ships with several new games that are fun to play and help you recharge your mind for a few minutes, like Mahjong and Chess. There's even a new game called Purble Palace that kids will love.

These programs are part of the Vista operating system and just need to be enabled.

Click the Vista Start button and select Control Panel from the right side of the programs menu. Then select "Programs" and you'll see a link titled "Turn Windows features on or off".

Expand the option for Games and check off the ones you'd like to install/enable. Click OK and you'll now have access to games on your laptop.

To play a game, just click Start --> All Programs --> Games and select the game you'd like to play.

I love the new version of Mahjong that comes with several choices of tile layouts:

As you know, I've been a strong advocate of my Blackberry Curve and wrote an article a few months ago titled Five Reasons Why I Chose a Blackberry Curve Instead of an iPhone. I take my Blackberry everywhere, and am continually checking email, checking on my websites, finding my location on Google Maps with the built-in GPS, and loving everything about it... EXCEPT:

It's Internet speed is too (yawn) slow. EDGE (the network technology used by the Blackberry and many other mobile phones) is dull, and way too slow compared to the new 3G speeds that the iPhone will have come July 11th, 2008 when it's released to the masses.

I already know how fast 3G is from my Aircard that plugs into my laptop and gives me fast broadband internet speeds. That's what we'll have with the new iPhone.

According to Apple CEO Steve Jobs an 8GB iPhone 3G will sell for $199 and the 16GB model will sell for $299, and will come in white and black versions. You can buy these iPhone 3G models on July 11.

Dropping the price to $199 makes this a no-brainer decision (especially if they keep the lower monthly service plan that's always been less expensive than the Blackberry's $30 monthly rate).

GPS: yep, it's built-in.

I'm heading to London tomorrow for a week long business trip and will need to have access to phone, email, and internet on my Blackberry Curve (I'm the Education Manager for Jive Software and will be delivering 4 days worth of training on Clearspace, our collaboration application).

Phone calls are crazy expensive internationally, with rates of $1.29 per minute in the UK.

Fortunately I spend a lot more time on email and the web then I do on the phone, and AT&T has an international data plan that's $64.99 a month for unlimited email and internet. I'll be able to check email, browse the web (tweet on Twitter, etc), and text home occasionally.

When you sign up for the international data plan, it drops your phone calls down to 99 cents a minute. Still not cheap, but if I have to make a business call then Jive will reimburse me.

I'll switch back to the regular Blackberry data plan when I return home, which is only $30 a month.

I also have an Aircard for broadband internet tethering on my laptop, but the data plan for that was something like $130 - too much in my opinion, and the training facility will have high speed internet, as will my hotel.