John Wargo

A few weeks back the press announced a new BlackBerry site managed by RIM called myblackberry.com. I quickly went online to see what it was and was frustrated for several weeks by its unavailability. Last week the pundits started announcing that the site was live so I went out again to try to access the site. Here's what I got:

I decided to try again today and was able to access then register with the site. Funny thing happened when I registered, it allowed me (actually required me) to set my own security question, but for some bizarre reason forced a minimum length for my answer. See below:

I dutifully entered my question and the answer but found that it was too short. What was I to do? I coudn't change my answer to fit the minimum length required by the form. Rediculous. I had to pick a different question to use.

I have to admit that I hate it when web developers force a requirement for an input field but don't tell me about it until after I populate the field wth the value I want to use. How much simpler would it be to tell me in advance what the requirements are so I could assess my security question and associated answer before hitting the submit button? I would have known immediately that my 'answer' was too short and selected a different question. Of course, after returning to the form you see above, certain of the fields I'd populated were blanked out, so I had to repopulate other portions of the form as well. Not a very helpful design.

Apologies to anyone who tried to hit the site between last Friday and today. My ISP somehow switched my PHP configuration to PHP 4 and everything broke. I finally got it back up tonight and still have some issues to resolve with my ISP.

I'm working on the articles related to accessing a web service from a Java application, I should have the first article in the series up by the end of this week.

Interesting that Torch Mobile announced today that they were purchased by RIM (and RIM didn't announce it).

There have been a lot of articles lately on the Web about how RIM's going to update the browser to match industry standards and I guess we now know. I'm curious to how this is going to work - I've always heard that WebKit was based on C, not sure how easy it's going to be to do a full port to Java so it will run on the BlackBerry. Only time will tell and I can't wait to see.

I'm continuously amazed at US Carriers attitude toward its customers. It's clear that everyday users just want to pay the carrier to use their network and be able to do whatever they want on it. The carriers of course don't want that - they want you to see them as providing specific servcies that you just can't do without and be willing to pay extra money for them. They're spending all of this money to add all these features when the majority of thier users just want email, SMS, phone and web browsing. I don't know about you, but I don't use any additional featurs provided by my carrier; I use the phone and my BlackBarry plan, nothing more.

I was reading an interesting article on FirrceWireless this morning about how all of a sudden Apple is 'still evaluating' the Google Voice application they blocked. What prompted this post was the following statement:

'In its response, AT&T said it had nothing to do with the situation.

Apple's lengthy statement included a number of interesting tidbits. The company said "There is a provision in Apple's agreement with AT&T that obligates Apple not to include functionality in any Apple phone that enables a customer to use AT&T's cellular network service to originate or terminate a VoIP session without obtaining AT&T's permission."

In letters sent earlier this month to Apple and Google as well as iPhone operator partner AT&T, the FCC asked why Apple chose to turn down Google Voice.'

Read more: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/apple-fcc-were-still-evaluating-google-voice-app/2009-08-21?utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss&cmp-id=OTC-RSS-FW0#ixzz0P6OpuQLM.

The carriers are so afraid of VOIP since it allows customers to just use their network - even for voice calls. All of that revenue from phone minutes that are never used would go away if I could do VOIP over my BlackBerry data plan.

What most people don't realize is that for most of these so called VOIP solutions for BlackBerry the phone call is still made over the Voice network. It's not a VOIP call. When you place a call on Skype for BlackBerry and likely Google Voice, the application connects to a data center somewhere and tells it the user wants to make a call. The back-end application dials the BlackBerry device and, when the BlackBerry application accepts the call, dials the desitination phone number and connects it to the BlackBerry. There's no VOIP here - the app is using the data network to initiate the call, but the actual call is executed on the carrier's voice network.

The other mind boggling aspect of this is UMA - a technology used by T-Mobile in the US to allow you to use a Wi-Fi network connection to place voice calls. Yep, it's VOIP, but get this - you have to pay the carrier to use it.  So, if you own a company and you have a Wi-Fi network, you can place calls over your own internal network, but your wireless carrier is going to charge you a monthly fee to use the feature. Huh? You're going to charge me to use my own network and equipment to place phone calls?  That's CRAZY!

The carriers are going to have to wake up and realize what their customers really want and stop blocking these technologies. If not, there's going to be a revolution. Some carrier is going to come around that's going to understand that they're just a pipe and make it easy for their customers. I'd gladly pay $100 a month to be able to do anything I wanted on the network - provided they stopped putting all sorts of junk applications on my devcie and stopped trying to get me to buy all sorts of extra services.