no, really

For the longest time, I didn’t jump on the Cingular bandwagon. I had an old AT&T plan that was amazing, so I kept it all through the Cingular acquisition, and even up to the “new” AT&T. One of the great features of the plan was free incoming text messages.

I really exploited this feature. I set up my gmail to forward my txts to my phone, my gCal notifications… everything, via my

@mmode.com email address. Occasionally it was a pain, like when automated systems sent me a slew of messages at once and it wouldn’t stop beeping at me! But overall, it was like a free blackberry.I since had to change my plan (and made it better for less money… lord knows how), and now I pay for incoming txts. But when you’ve got 1500 a month, you don’t tend to run out.

All the sudden, this week… they stopped. Just….. stopped. And it bugged me a little. I was afraid my txts were broken, or I went over some mysterious limit. I googled a little for an answer, to no avail. I tested out sending from different accounts - no answer. I decided to do some network sleuthing on the @mmode.com address. As it turned out, the domain stopped working altogether! It was still owned by Cingular, but nothing was responding to it.

So I started to dig a little more into att’s text messaging to see if there was an answer. Nothing in the forums. Then I found this page that gave a summary of text messaging, and lo and behold! Waaaay at the bottom: “Send and receive emails using your phone’s email address. Your address is your 10-digit number@txt.att.net.” Brilliant!

I tested, and it works. I set up my gmail to do its thing, and presto! Order is restored. Now att… why couldn’t you do something nice like send everyone a text saying “we’re shutting the @mmode.com address off. please switch to @txt.att.net”? I guess they offer it, but it probably isn’t something they like to advertise. After all… for every email that is sent to a phone’s txt messaging, that’s one fewer text someone had to send.

I think I keep coming back to this post, and I’m not sure why. As anyone who knows me already knows, I’m reasonably satisfied with my phone. It works splendidly, and still gets the “wow that’s thin” comments I enjoy so much. I do wish I had a more functional device, but one that’s *actually* functional, none of this flash-bang stuff that’s all fluff and no substance.

Naturally, the closest thing to what I’m looking for is packaged in schmancy Apple design, but it’s only a reasonably close approximation. The two reasons I stayed away from the iPhone were 1) potential reliability issues in v1.0, and 2) price. I personally know a few people who got the phone the instant it came out, and still maintain the facade of elation.

But, just as I suspected, the honeymoon is over.

After the wow of the slick and prettiness has worn off, and the pixie dust has settled, you gotta ask yourself “does it really do what I want?” Fred says “nope.” I figured as much. When I’ve got a big purchase, I usually delay as long as I can to be absolutely sure it’s what I want and/or need. I was tempted by the iPhone, but the price tag turned me off from day 1. That and hassling with at&t for their contract bs.

Fred has some odd requests, like that it shouldn’t have a phone. He’s clearly approaching this mobile device thing from the other direction. While I’m a huge fan of using things *other* than the telephone to communicate over the course of my day (particularly loving using my bluetooth headset with iChat), when it comes down to it, I believe the phone has its place. Sure, Skype offers phone-like features, but after last week’s mysterious Skype outage, who do you trust more?  Besides, I think Fred’s opinions are colored by the build-your-own-mobile-device thing he’s invested in.
As everyone is, I’m curious to see if and what Google is producing.  I’m guessing it’ll be very g-app centric (which is fine), and there must be some ability for Google to stick their ubiquitous advertising in front of the user (otherwise, why would they waste their time?).  If we haven’t heard anything about it, I wonder - is it carrier neutral?  Is it only wi-fi?

I’m sure it’s going to be at least a year or so before a device really entices me to plop down a few hundred.

By now we’ve all read the wise opinions of Henry, Jason and Fred on how the current global financial woes affect the industry.  Overall sense: “negatively” with hope.  None of them seem to see this as another end-of-days, and after having experienced the bubble, we can all say that this doesn’t really resemble that.

(more…)

I started this one a long time ago, and never actually filled in any content. It’s something that I think about a bit when it comes to developing software. The temptation for anyone passionate about technology is to be inventive and clever about their development, in an effort to challenge themselves and maybe show off a little too.

This all came to me a while back when I was looking for a new cell phone. So many of the phones out there were either terrible or over-developed. One example would be the Nokia 7280 - an awkwardly sized phone with minimal display and no keypad designed to be “fashionable.” Just because you *can* make a tiny lipstick phone doesn’t mean you *should*.

(more…)

nextNY has always been a bit of a fascination for me in terms of organizational structure. It has no “leader” or “organizer.” There is no real group moderator, event planner, coordinator. All it has is a creator - Charlie O’Donnell, and members. How does it stay running and relevant?

(more…)

In my lead-in post, I briefly described the roles of the many and the few when it comes to software development. Volumes have been written on this topic, and it continues to be debated in conferences and whatnot. I’m trying to drag that Cathedral and Bazaar analogy to similar many/few situations and see if it still makes sense.

(more…)