The Insomniac Coder

From:  BlackBerry Playbook: How did Research in Motion lose its way? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine What's going on—how did BlackBerry, a brand that was the ne plus ultra of the mobile world just a few years ago, fall so swiftly? Although RIM is still selling lots of phones, several of its latest products have been panned, and its share of the smartphone market has been slipping. More importantly, the company's leaders—it has two CEOs , Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis —have been comically incoherent about their plans for the future. I can tell you why I ditched my last crackberry (the Curve 8530, best goddamn phone I have ever owned) for an android phone : the blackberry tax. It doesn't matter who provides your phone service, if you use a blackberry, you are going to pay the blackberry tax. This is because all data for the blackberry is piped through RIM's servers, and that of course costs money. Even prepaid carriers like Virgin Mobile have to pay for that...

Image via Wikipedia I just ran into this service while going through what is almost a regularly scheduled, weekly paranoia attack over my backups. I had just checked pricing on maybe upgrading my online backups service, or my social accounts online backups service, when I noticed that iDrive now has contacts backup for free for Blackberry , iPhone and Android.  I am already using Google Sync , but it wouldn't hurt to have a plan "b" in case Google takes a shit, so I decided to give it a try. The application has nothing to configure beyond signing up for the free account and letting it run the backups. As far as I can tell from the exhaustive four minutes I spent testing this, you can only backup manually, there is no way to let it run in the background. With Google Sync you just let it run and that's it. Also, it mangled my contacts, the fields in the contacts I checked in my Blackberry don't match the contacts as seen in their website. I modified a contact,...

Image by pvera via Flickr Wondering why the hell your emails from your Blackberry append this: Sent from my BlackBerry® powered by Virgin Mobile. To your emails even after you specifically changed the setting in your Blackberry email preferences menu? Simple. You have to remember that your emails go through RIM servers, which is their excuse for what I call the "Blackberry Tax" (every Blackberry provider in the country will tack some kind of fee to your bill and call it something like "Blackberry Service," in Virgin's case it is $10/month). You need to go to RIM's server and change your preferences there. For Blackberries serviced by Virgin Mobile, it is not even hard. All you need to do is go to  http://virginmobileusa.blackberry.com/  from your blackberry and it should recognize your device. From there you can edit or remove that annoying signature.  Make sure you do this from your Blackberry, otherwise it will ask you to enter your PIN and your Devi...