The release of Android 2.2 (Froyo) and going on vacation inspired me to try dumping my Crackberry altogether and just using the Nexus One fulltime. All in all it’s been working out quite well.

I’ve also been adding apps like a demon. Here’s the current list:
Adobe Flash
Adobe Reader
Advanced Task Killer
AIM
ASTRO File Manager
AT&T myWireless
Barcode Scanner
CaltrainDroid
CardioTrainer
Compass
DoubleTwist
Dropbox
Foursquare
Gowalla
Last.fm
NewsRob
OpenTable
Photoshop.com Mobile
Ringdroid
Shazam
Shopper
The Weather Channel
Tripit
Urbanspoon
WordPress

And for fun:
Android LightSaber
Bubble
Bump
iVuvuzela
Jewels
Magic 8-Ball

Even better? Every single one of those apps are free (note that DoubleTwist is currently “free for a limited time”, YMMV).

Plus there’s the built-in apps, some of which are new or significantly improved in 2.2, including the email and gmail clients, calendar, Navigation, Voice Search, and the Google Sky Map.

The only things I miss from my Blackberry are the battery life and the real keyboard, and with any luck there’ll be more Androids with keyboards out this fall.

With Spring in the air I’ve been making some changes (or trying to) on my personal technology use. It’s been a mixed bag of success, which leaves me currently caught in transition — not quite ready to let go of the old and not fully embracing the new.

First off, Chrome for Mac is at the point where it’s usable and I’m starting to switch over to it. As a browser, it lives up to its reports — fast, stripped down, easy to use. My bookmarks were easy to transfer, too. I don’t love how Chrome handles their bookmark display but I’m adjusting fairly easily. And I like the choice of themes, they are much nicer looking that the Firefox themes.

What’s been keeping me from full-out Chrome adoption is that I have a huge pile of passwords stored in Firefox and Xmarks and getting them ported over hasn’t worked. Some of my friends have told me that they should be portable, but so far I haven’t found the setting or application that will help me do it.

This raises the whole issue of password management. Like many people who try to be reasonably secure with my passwords, I have a lot of them and if I don’t visit a site frequently I don’t always remember what password I used. Hence I’ve gotten pretty dependent on tools to help me manage them all (which is also a possible source of insecurity, I know). I haven’t tried 1Password or LastPass yet but I probably should. (Got any suggestions?)

I expect I’ll make a full transition pretty soon but sometimes it’s just easier to open a page in Firefox than try to remember exactly what password I used for what site. So for now I’m still switching between the two.

I’ve also been giving Windows 7 a look. Boot Camp makes trying Win7 on my MacBook Pro pretty painless, so I created a new partition on my personal laptop and installed a copy.

It’s been a few years since Windows was my full-time OS and that was XP, so Win7 is a new experience. Microsoft has clearly done a lot of work on the OS and it’s a more visually-appealing OS these days. I’d be lying if I said I was enthusiastic about making a complete switch though. Having to re-buy all my software, unlearn all the keyboard shortcuts I rely on, and deal with a much more complex set of system settings (not to mention having to worry about viruses again) is not something I’m looking forward to.

Still, it’s been fun to play with something new, and there are a few games I had to give up when I went Mac that I’d like to be able to play again (if I ever have time!). I’ll keep testing & see how I feel after a little more time using it.

It could also be that if I had different hardware I’d feel a little differently — the MacBook Pro’s touchpad isn’t really designed for use with Windows and that’s giving me some issues. I’ve looked at a few Dell and Toshiba possibilities but given that this MBP is less thsn a year old, I’m not feeling the need to go out and buy a new laptop just now.

I’m also still stuck in transition on the phone front, carrying both the Nexus One and my Blackberry. The N1 is a really nice handheld computer and I like it a lot; I’ve gotten rid of my iPod Touch now that I have it. For e-mail though, I still can’t shake free of the Blackberry. The keyboard and Exchange integration are too good.

My deepest wish is that RIM would hurry up and put out a Flash-enabled phone with a big screen and a slider keyboard. I may have to suck it up and go with another solution though, because my much-loved old Curve has taken quite a beating these past 2 years and I’m not sure how much longer I can wait for a replacement for it. I know there will be a lot more options coming soon but I am finding it hard to be patient.

I’m in London this week, doing a series of team and community meetings. One of the fun things that have happen this week is the team all got brand-new Nexus One phones while we’re here.

I’m a pretty hardcore Blackberry user but when someone hands you a new, cool phone just begging to have a SIM card added to it, the Blackberry can wait. I’ve been using the Nexus for about a day now, and here’s some initial impressions:

Things I like about the Nexus One

The screen is gorgeous. The cameras is far better than the one on my Blackberry. The phone feels good when you hold it. Not too heavy, not too bulky.

Adding new apps – a breeze. There’s lots to choose from in the app store, including many popular apps like Urbanspoon, Shazam, Foursquare, and many others. I got a dozen apps onto the phone in short order. Definitely much closer to the iTunes Store experience than the pain of adding apps to my Blackberry.

And Flash Player 10.1 beta is looking pretty good.

Things I’m Not So Sure About

I’m spoiled by my Blackberry’s ability to go as much as three days without a charge, so having to charge more often is a bit of a bummer. Not a showstopper though.

The music client. I don’t see anything that will make me want to give up my iPod. (The Last.fm app is nice though)

Covering that gorgeous screen with very visible fingerprints.

The London weather hasn’t been very sunny today but even so using the screen in daylight is definitely a bit harder than using it indoors.

Given that this is is a Google product it’s probably inevitable, but the deep lock-in and integration with other Google products is annoying for those of us who are not hardcore Google users. I don’t use Picasa, gChat, or Google Contacts, for example, and if I want to really use the Nexus, they’re hard to avoid.

Things I Definitely Don’t Like

The built-in IMAP client is poor, making it tough for those of us who don’t run our email through Gmail. I expect there will be a third-party solution pretty soon though.

Comment spam in the app market reviews. Really annoying.

Trying to do the two-thumb typing I am used to on a real keyboard is really frustrating. My error rate is close to 100% when I try it on the Nexus. To be fair, though, this isn’t specific to the Nexus; I felt the same trying to use my iPod Touch’s keyboard as well. I’ve simply spent a lot of years using various Palm / Blackberry devices with real keyboards and it’s going to be very, very hard for me to let go of needing to feel real keys under my fingers and relearn how to type on a handheld. Typing with one finger, aided by the very nice auto complete feature, is much less painful. It’s just not very fast.

Things I Haven’t Figured Out Yet

The best way to synch data (contacts, etc) off either my desktop or my Blackberry. I need to research this some more. Being able to sync data from Facbook is interesting. Ideally I’d like to get my work info on it too, but Exchange support is a bit shaky so far.

All In All

I like the Nexus a lot more than I thought I would. I am not sure if I will be able to adjust to the lack of a real keyboard and I don’t love the Google-lock in, but other than that I’m pretty impressed.

And did I mention how nice the beta of Flash 10.1 looks on it? :p

New to me, that is. I recently adopted an iPod Touch from a friend who had upgraded to a Pre and didn’t want the Touch anymore. It came with me on my recent trip to NYC and I had a chance to put it through its paces pretty thoroughly along the way.

I like it quite a bit — for games, web browsing, and of course music. Battery life is decent (a cross-country flight didn’t even drain half the charge) and the screen is lovely. But I am still glad that I didn’t get an iPhone. The iPod’s virtual keyboard does not even come close to being as good as a real keyboard and I’d go nuts trying to manage my email with it.

I do feel a bit silly carrying an iPod Touch as well as a Blackberry. I think it’s the size. I’ve had an iPod Nano for ages, so I shouldn’t feel different about the Touch, but it is bigger than a Nano and that seems to matter. Even so, it’s not a showstopping issue.

I really hate the lack of a decent web browser on the Blackberry but its superb email handling still makes it the winning smartphone for my needs. Unless an AT&T Palm Pre comes out and utterly blows me away, looks like I’ll be staying a two-gadget gal for the foreseeable future.

I’m not sure if I have gone over to the Dark Side or to the light, but as of last night I’m the owner of a Blackberry Curve 8310.

Setting the BlackBerry up is kind of a pain, especially since my old Cingular SIM card needed to be replaced by a new AT&T card. I had to call to activate the phone, then go through three different setup procedures to get my BIS account and associated email activated. It’s not a very user-friendly process and had me seriously wondering what I’d gotten myself into.

Once that was all done, though, things got easier. I love the over-the-air install, and already have three 3rd party applications running on my Curve: Twitterberry, the Gmail client, and a multi-IM client called WebMessenger. I still don’t really know how to use all the features of the Curve, but I’ll learn.

On a side note — switching SIM cards, while not a Blackberry-specific issue, brought to light exactly how unorganized and messy my personal address book management has become over the past few years. I run Thunderbird on my desktop and my laptop, and neither of those address books is complete or up-to-date, with some more key data living only on the SIM that I can no longer use.

No matter what I do for a PIM solution next, it’s going to involve a bunch of tedious manual data entry to bring all the bits and pieces of contact info I’ve accumulated together. I’ve got to figure out how to minimize that. I’ve even found myself wondering if this might be a good job for Plaxo (I’ve heard that they are not a grubby spamhaus anymore).

Thoughts?

So today I accidentally did something very stupid. I locked my keys inside my car. Luckily for me, I have AAA. I called them and inside of an hour, the nice service guy got my door opened in about 30 seconds.

This is the second time this year I’ve needed to call AAA and my experience last time was just as good. And for this, I pay about $50 a year. What a bargain!

OnStar costs three times as much. Why would I want to pay that much more when the service I get from AAA is so great already?

Well, I’m back from Vegas, thoroughly exhausted, but glad I went. I met some great folks I’d previously only “known” online, and some new people as well. I went to one great party and one really sucky one. I’ve already blogged the notes from some of the presentations I went to – I also went to others that were not as good, but decided not to blog those. And I finally got to experience Las Vegas.

I can’t say I learned anything completely new at BlogWorld Expo, but I did fill in a couple of knowledge gaps (thanks Avinash!) and also came away feeling much more confident about my knowledge base.

Blogging well is not rocket science, after all. You only need three things to blog: a willingness to commit the time to do it, basic writing skills, and something to say. Ideally, what you have to say is topical, focused, entertaining, insightful, and/or informative. And if you can combine all those with a flair for self-promotion, then you have a shot at running a successful, well-read blog.

(You might ask, if I know this, why isn’t my blog more successful? Easy. I lack focus.)

Although I think the show was generally a success, I think it suffered a little by trying to reach the biggest possible audience. With dedicated tracks for sports bloggers and political bloggers and military bloggers and “god bloggers” as well as a range of more general blogging topics, the show and the attendees were all over the place. If the goal was to pump attendance as much as possible in order to make the sponsors happy, then I can see why they’d choose that tactic, but if you’re going to do that, you need to build more into the conference program to help people connect with each other. Adding some “BOF” (birds of a feather) networking sessions, for example, would be a good start. Maybe a few “unconference” slots, or a demo pit for bloggers to show off their blogs. Heck, even an easy to find OPML file of attendees would help.

BlogWorld Expo’s show floor was a mixed bag. A few interesting startups – Cocomment in particular looks like something I should give a thorough test-drive (plus they had great swag) — but also a bunch of political / military booths, and a big pile of vendors who were all about either 1) adding content to your blog (widgets & feeds) and/or 2) monetizing your blog (mostly via ads). Since I was there with my “corporate” hat on, I wasn’t all that interested in either category.

One other thing that jumped out at me was how bad the marketing was at a significant percentage of booths. Now, trade show marketing isn’t easy. You have a limited amount of space and time in which to get your message across, in a space you don’t have a lot of control over, and generally without enough budget. Plus, odds are several of your competitors will also be there. Doing it well is a real challenge.

But still, this is not brain surgery here, and some companies really dropped the ball. For example, I saw several booths where the entire display had no clear statement what the product was. I suppose those companies though that if they used clever teasers they’d get more people talking to the booth staff, but I found it annoying. Another booth featured a poker table. Yeah, I get it, poker is a Vegas tie-in, very cute, but it seems to me the subtext you’re putting out is that doing business with your company is a gamble. Not the message I’d send.

And then there were the booths where a couple of different groups or companies were piled in together. It worked in the Military.com booth, where they loaned space to a couple of relevant non-profits, but when you’ve got companies that have no clear link to each other jammed into a booth with sloppy piles of completely unrelated brochures, you’re not fooling anybody. I am a big fan of the “if you’re going to do something, don’t half-ass it” school of thought. If you can’t afford a proper booth, find something you can do well within your marketing budget and do that instead.

(I didn’t intend to spend so much time writing about the show floor, actually, but there’s an outside chance I’ll be in a booth at Macworld, so I’ve spent some time recently thinking about the subject. I guess it’s rubbed off.)

This is getting very long, and I’m ready to call it a night. So I’ll wrap for now. I might add some more tomorrow, we’ll see.

…picked a new web host, that is.

In recent comments, I got asked how I decided which web host to switch to once I gave up on Powweb. Truth is, it was not easy, and I very nearly re-upped with Powweb again, on the theory “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” But over the last 4 years, Powweb has gone from being a great company to one that I barely tolerated. I couldn’t bring myself to give them the $$ for another year. So I switched.

Finding a new host was definitely not a one-time project. I collected information on and off over the course of many months, from a number of sources. Those include word-of-mouth reports from other web folks on 2 mailing lists (WWWAC and SF-WOW) and reports from friends (like Glen). That gave me some anecdotal evidence to start with. Another site that was helpful for giving feedback and potential hosting company names was the WebHosting Talk forums.

I tended to avoid the various websites that list or rate web hosts, since many of them gave the impression of being basically advertising vehicles for the hosting companies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but I wanted user feedback more than anything else. Basic web hosting is so much of a commodity these days that I was more concerned with customer satisfaction within the price point I’d chosen (under $100 a year) than the nitty-gritty of exactly how many MBs of disk space or how many e-mail accounts I’d get with my service. I also gave bonus points to companies that had an actual customer forum, not just a one-way support desk.

I looked at Dreamhost, Laughing Squid, Media Temple, Lunarpages, 1 and 1, iPowerWeb, and a few others before deciding that A2 looked good. I did some more digging into A2, looking for reports of dissatisfied customers, outages, etc. Nothing bad jumped out at me. So I filed the information away.

As I said, this happened over the course of several months. Periodically I’d re-check, to see if opinion about a company was trending one way or another (increased outages, reports of slowness / overselling, etc). A2 still looked good.

Eventually, my old contract was about to run out, and it was time to push the button, one way or the other. So I took a deep breath and signed up with A2. And here I am.

That’s a little longwinded, but it’s the story of how I chose a new web host. I hope it helps someone.

I was scanning Twitter when I should be working, and came across this via Scoble:

On the one hand, it’s funny. On the other hand, how is this going to help sell more Toyotas?

I don’t see MMO fans as a prime market for oversized pickup trucks…. although maybe they’ve got some research to prove me wrong.

I signed up for Twitter some three months ago. Unlike some of Twitter’s more rapturous fans (like Scoble), my feelings are more mixed. On the one hand, I “get” Twitter. I like the idea, I think there’s a lot of uses for the service, and I’m pretty happy with the feature set. I’ve found some people who are using Twitter in interesting ways, and two real-life friends also Twitter. When it’s good, Twitter can be a lot of fun.

On the other hand, using Twitter feels like shouting down a well most of the time. I can count on the fingers of one hand the people who’ve actually had any interaction with me on Twitter (including the friends). It’s hard to stay enthusiastic about something when you get so little feedback.

All in all, I’d give my first 90 days with Twitter a B. I’m not inclined to stop Twittering, but it’s in no danger of replacing my blog any time soon.