John M. Wargo

I can't remember why, but for some reason I wanted to look at my BlackBerry device software version the other day, so I fired up the Options application and started typing 'about' as shown in the following figure. I noticed some interesting things and that prompted me to write this post.

Figure 1

When you first launch the application, it displays a screen similar to the one shown in the following figure. I'm running a BlackBerry Bold 9900 and I absolutely love it. It's small, fast, easy to use and I just have to have a full keyboard – makes me more efficient.

The device is running BlackBerry Device Software 7, which I knew, but you'll notice that it's running Platform version 5.0.0.680. I've written about this before here, but I had to bring it up again. So many people incorrectly refer to 'BlackBerry OS' when what they really mean is BlackBerry Device Software version. In this case, I'm running BlackBerry Device Software 7, but the OS is actually 5.0. So, people who say BlackBerry OS 7 are referring to an operating system that technically doesn't exist (yet). RIM refers to it as BlackBerry 7 OS which in actuality means the OS running BlackBerry Device Software 7, not version 7 of the BlackBerry OS. Make sense?

Figure 2

When you press any key on the device, the screen will switch to a different screen in the application. This of course makes it hard to switch to a screen capture application and keep the same screen on the display. To take the screen shots within this article, I had to leave the app on the previous screen to the one I wanted to screen capture, use Alt-Escape to switch to the home screen and launch the screen capture utility. The act of switching to another application would cause the About screen to switch so when I came back from launching the screen capture utility, the screen I wanted to capture would be on 'top' of the screen. I think perhaps that RIM needs to fix this, switching applications shouldn't advance the About screen to the next page.

Anyways, the next screen of the application shows the Java license information as shown in Figure 3. This makes sense since the BlackBerry is a Java device. I like Java and one of the few big disappointments in my professional life is that I never got a chance to do a lot of development in Java (before I moved on to more sales or management roles). Oh well.

Figure 3

Next came a screen that surprised me. Take a look at Figure 4, it shows a copyright notice from Nuance, the folks that currently own the rights to Dragon Naturally Speaking software. Now, the BlackBerry has had voice recognition capabilities for a very long time – before Android and definitely before iOS. Apparently Nuance provided the software that provided that capability. What's interesting about this is that Nuance is also the software behind the Siri service included with iOS 5.

It's interesting that the BlackBerry is running the same software (or a version of it of course) that makes Siri so popular. I tried to use Siri on my iPhone 4 yesterday and with every query I made of the application, it executed a completely different task than I asked it to perform. So much for that.

Figure 4

Next came a notice from Qualcomm and WebKit. Qualcomm for some part of the Radio and/or processor chipset and WebKit because the BlackBerry (and every popular smartphone but Windows Phone) uses Apple's WebKit rendering engine to render web pages in the browser.

Figure 5

The next one surprised me, as shown in Figure 6, the BlackBerry device shows a copyright notice from the Android open source project. Now I know that the BlackBerry PlayBook allows a developer to package an Android application so it will run on the PlayBook, I wasn't aware of the same capability being available on BlackBerry devices. Apparently RIM's doing some work in this area (or something else related to Android) so that's why this notice is in the About Application. It will be interesting to see what RIM does with the Android support.

Figure 6

I like my iPhone. It’s got a cool UI and the apps are great. Unfortunately, I just can’t use one day to day – there’s too many klugy things about it. The BlackBerry has spoiled me with the keyboard, I can so quickly go to the top of a list (by pressing the ‘t’ key), bottom of a list (the ‘b’ key), File an email message (‘f’ key) and most importantly use the keyboard to type the name of the folder I’m filing an email into.

I get more than 100 emails a day and the way iOS and Android forces me to swipe through this huge folder list (I have a hundred or more folders in my inbox –  I use folders to keep my inbox manageable, go figure) rather than just let me use the keyboard (virtual or physical, I don’t care) to type the first few characters of the folder name drives me crazy.  These devices are ‘supposed’ to be Enterprise friendly, but neither Apple nor Google has seemed to view the Enterprise user as one who needs a simple and efficient way to manage filing email messages into folders.

Even RIM, who hasn’t done a lot of smart things lately, was smart enough to still show an option to bring up the keyboard when filing messages – even on touch only devices. How hard can it be?

Anyway, iOS are cool devices, but unusable for someone who needs to actually manage a real inbox.

I laughed out loud when I saw an article today entitled ‘Steve Wozniak sings Android praises’ located here: http://www.tgdaily.com/mobility-brief/60837-steve-wozniak-sings-android-praises.

My favorite quote from the article? Here ya go:

“Wozniak conceded that Android is a better choice for people who actually know what they're doing when it comes to technology.”

That statement is absolutely correct. I’ve been having a long, heated argument with some long time colleagues about this topic and it’s really true. If you don’t know what you’re doing or if you don’t have any real experience with mobile technology, the iPhone is an amazing device. If you know what you’re doing and you have experience with smartphones, the iPhone will drive you crazy.

I gave my wife an iPad and when her laptop died, I expected her to just use the iPad for everything. No can do – she hates it. She knows what she’s doing and knows what she wants to be able to do with the device and since iOS blocks her from doing what she wants in so many ways, the device drives her crazy and she hardly uses it.

Is this what Apple expected? No, but I imagine they don’t really care.

I’m struggling to find value in the BlackBerry 7 Status Pane that appears at the top of the BlackBerry home screen and, when clicked, displays the screen shown in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1

When you look at the image, it should be clear that there’s really very little information displayed on the screen. Now, when I wrote about things like this in the past, I got comments back that the issue I’m experiencing is related to my device’s current font settings. Those comments were correct, the problem is caused by my font settings. My problem is that I have older eyes and the BlackBerry is the only popular smartphone that allows me to set system-wide font settings. On my BlackBerry devices, I crank up the font size and I can sometimes (if there’s bright light) read the screen without my glasses on.

That being said though, why do I have to put up with this? The BlackBerry SDK includes an API I can use to determine what the system fonts are, so the OS and an application can tell how the text will display. If I remember correctly, there’s even an API an application can use to determine the amount of space a piece of text will take up on the screen (using the current font settings of course). So why doesn’t the BlackBerry OS know it needs to render this text onto multiple lines or at least remove some content from each line so at least some of the text will display in its entirety.

Displaying small, incomplete parts of the information I’m seeking does me no good. It provides no value at all.

I didn't get a chance to write a formal post about this, but on December 11th I finished the writing process of my forthcoming PhoneGap book called PhoneGap Essentials. I had a contract with the publisher that said I had to deliver the manuscript on February 2nd, but I delivered it about 6 weeks earlier – whew! It was a lot of work and a lot of fun, I really like writing.

Right now the manuscript is going through a technical review; an experienced PhoneGap developer is reading through the manuscript, testing all the code and making comments back to me. I can't say who it is doing the review right now, but it's someone who really knows PhoneGap, so I'm excited to have him on the review team. So far he's delivered his comments on 19 of the book's 25 chapters, so hopefully he will be done soon.

I'm going to start working on processing his edits this week and hopefully have the book into the formal editing process some time next week. From there it will take a few weeks to get the editing all done then it's on to production then onto paper. Even though the Amazon page for the book says the book will be available toward the end of May, I expect the book to be in stores by the end of March (or very quickly thereafter).

Don't forget that you can already pre-order copies of the book now. If you're interested in the book, please pre-order now. Right now, the book's not too high on the search results for Amazon, but as more people order a copy, it should come up in the rankings. Please help me out if you're so inclined.

Over the holidays I started working on the book's web site at www.phonegapessentials.com. It's a little light on content right now, but as it gets closer to the book's release date, I'll finish up the articles and post some code samples up there. Check out the site if you get a chance.

Thanks in advance for your help and support.