I seriously love my Droid Eris which is amazing since I lived my Blackberry so much. I am even blogging this from the Wordpress app.
But there are a few things I am excited to see improvements on and as i come across them I will add comments to this post to document.
Please add your own:
Google is getting better at telling you the information you need while out and about.
Now, Google maps can show you if a product you want is in stock nearby.
Next, I’d like to have even more granular information for a given location such as when I am in Home Depot and I can’t find ten penny nails or sprinkler heads or when I’m in Walmart and none of the thirty seven aisles seem to have sugar free, organic apple juice
I have an 8830 “world edition” blackberry smartphone from Verizon wireless and I have to note a few things I wish could be improved.
* There’s a GPS built into the device, but VZ disabled it so you can’t use it because Verizon wants you to pay an extra $20/month for their Navigation service. That stinks.
* The 8830 seems to have a severe memory management problem, dumping txts and email, phone and call logs without warning, a few times a week.
* Having no camera is bad enough, but not able to receive Picture messages without using the web browser is kinda dumb.
* Other devices allow YouTube and streaming video/audio but not so on the 8830, presumably so you’ll sign up for “vCast”.
* More of an “I wish” for Verizon itself, the fact that I can’t use just the data plan (or the phone+texting without data plan is pretty ludicrous. Its just money, after all, but while going with Verizon may mean great cellular service (reception) it also means a hefty bite from your wallet each month.
Hopefully, Verizon won’t leave 8830 users behind as they roll out software for the Pearl, Storm and other new Blackberries.
Update: It does appear I am not the only one reporting problems with the 8830.
The long-awaited re-emergence of GrandCentral since Google bought them has come about, being dubbed (of course) Google Voice (what did you expect? With other products named such novel things as “mail” and “news” or (what was that original one called, again?… oh yes…) “search”?)
Since it’s just launching, it remains to be seen if Google Voice will put all the features it promises into a package consumers will love.
ZDNET feels the service has the “potential to make the search giant a middleman in an important part of people’s lives, telephone communications. With the service, people can pick a new phone number from Google Voice; when others call it, Google can ring all the actual phones a person uses and handle voice mail.”
This is all moving us forward to a future more “wired”, but less tethered… as phone numbers become enduring modes of contact, getting a “google number” will ensure that people can reach out to you for years to come.
When using Grand Central, I enjoyed the use of the tool, but wished it could allow me to provide more intuitive rules around callers or on-the-fly commands. It appeared that Grandcentral was purchased before it was fully “baked”. I am looking forward to how Google Voice has improved the service… as well as looking forward to having ONE NUMBER TO RULE THEM ALL (or filter them “all” out).
Interestingly, this application feels a lot like GMAIL, google’s email system. It’s transformation of email from a “messages” based platform to a “conversation” based one, then heralding the introduction of powerful rules-based management, simple keyboard shortcuts, and account access from various methods… all for the price of having ads appearing around your messages (but not IN them, which Yahoo/Hotmail still do).
As long as the tool (if it becomes ad-aware) displays relevant ads to me without overly-annoying, and ensures that my privacy will be maintained* then I am very interested in the tool.
If you follow me on Twitter, the ultra-easy status-update app would have told you that I’ve been camping at Bear Lake last week… but you wouldn’t have known exactly where. That part of the picture is left out.
But more important than you trying to find me, it is still very difficult is to find out what is around you when you are at a place unfamiliar to you–to access the world of knowledge about a place–in a easily digestible map-based, easily transportable format.
For example: Two things I wanted to do this week included getting to the beach, and going for some hikes. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money for access to the beach, and at least one of the hikes I wanted to be enjoyable for some of the people with me who can’t hike treacherous terrain.
To accomplish this, I did the usual–but had to do it all from my Blackberry because my laptop was unavailable–I googled it. I searched phrases like “Hikes near Bear Lake, Utah” and “Good Beach Bear Lake, Utah“. Both turned up promising results, but I had to DIG for them:
Beach Access at Bear Lake:
The bottom-line is, we were able to find things after searching, but there was no clear way to search one place and say:
And have it provide results.
You’d think we would have figured this out by now!
My initial way to explain BrightKite is that it’s like Twitter (what you’re doing) + Location (Where you’re doing it), which I like. I am trying to determine how to use it (mainly because I use Verizon for my phone service, and it’s currently not supported).
But, I just bumped into it’s Map Friends feature, which shows you where your friends have last “checked in” and how you could find them. (See a screenshot, below of my current friendmap)
This seems to fit well with Brightkite’s vision to enable a social network that helps facilitate real-life friendships as well as virtual ones:
Wouldn’t it be nice to have social community around the locations you frequent? To actually meet new people, not Facebook-to-Myspace, but face-to-face? MySpace has done a really good job of facilitating meaningless cyber friendships with unprecedented ease. Ironically, Facebook does not easily enable face-time with friends at all. At Brightkite we believe tangible community has a place around real-world locations.
My current beefs with the platform will surely be addressed soon:
But I will say overall that my favorite, clear usage for this app at the moment is that it really does help you transcend just what people are DOING, and the conversation (which twitter does so well) and mash that up with actually understanding where people ARE, and what they are doing there.
If BrightKite doesn’t work for you, maybe you need one of these kittehs, instead:
