Guus Bosman

software engineering director


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BlackBerry Pearl

BlackBerry Pearl.Jean-Paul was right. I bought a new phone, and it's a indeed smartphone, the BlackBerry Pearl.

I looked at perhaps switching over to AT&T, but their plans were more expensive than Verizon, and Verizon gave me a sizable credit towards a new handset -- after the mail-in rebate the phone is free.

I thought data plans were around $70, but prices have come down quite a bit and I bought a $30 data plan that provides virtually unlimited data usage (5 GB monthly). The phone has full internet access, and I've connected my hotmail account to it. I installed Google maps as well, which is really quite useful on a handset.

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You have now officialy become a true "Blackberry-staring" American. I have been to New York last week, and I can not count the people I have bumped into which were walking while staring at their blackberry, or frantically typing away.

This is really annoying when pushing somebody in a wheelchair. Braking and turning is not as easy as the "blackberry people" might think while looking very irritated at me, as if to say "out of my way, can't you see I'm using my blackberry?"

I've also seen 4 to 5 people almost gotten run over by cars, either because they were on the phone, or the driver was on the phone, or both (shudder).

Use it wisely, stand or sit still when using it. There is a mythbusters episode which shows that people on the phone are actually worse drivers than drunk drivers.

I haven't yet bumped into people, but I know what you mean.

A good feature it has is auto-off. I've set it up so from midnight to 7.00 am it automatically switches off. This way I won't wake up every time I receive an e-mail.

I've worked with it for a couple of days now, and I really like it. This is my first phone with a camera in it, that's pretty cool also.

Sometime during our trip to California the USB port of my phone broke. I could no longer connect it to the PC and charging (which is through the same port) become very slow and unreliable. Tuesday I went to the store and they exchanged my phone for a new one.

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