email – ɔimoɈɒ

Texting the USA for nowt.

Dave Merton over at Macsimum News put together this neat guide for sending free text messages to people in the US and Canada. Create a new email message. In the To: box, type 10digitnumber@teleflip.com. (1235551234@teleflip.com) Type a message and click send. The message will be sent to the cell phone with the number in the … Continue reading “Texting the USA for nowt.”

Dave Merton over at Macsimum News put together this neat guide for sending free text messages to people in the US and Canada.

Create a new email message.
In the To: box, type 10digitnumber@teleflip.com. (1235551234@teleflip.com)
Type a message and click send.
The message will be sent to the cell phone with the number in the To: box as an email.
For extra geek points, add the person’s number in the teleflip format to your address book so you can easily text them without having to remember their number!

This is interesting because of the email component – you can automate emails! You can set up alerts to email in the event of a service failure but getting them as a text message means you just need a phone (though admittedly with Push email coming along, who needs lo-li text messages!)

Maybe some of the smart telecoms guys can enlighten me on what would be the costs to run something like this in Ireland and the UK.

BlackBerry forsees problems in next quarter?

Shares in RIM, the BlackBerry firm, fell nearly 8% after they announced earnings of $482 million, up from $223 million from the year-ago period on revenue of $2.24 billion. However this is not news. Look at RIMM over the course of a full year and you see the trend is unmistakeably upward (much like AAPL … Continue reading “BlackBerry forsees problems in next quarter?”

Shares in RIM, the BlackBerry firm, fell nearly 8% after they announced earnings of $482 million, up from $223 million from the year-ago period on revenue of $2.24 billion. However this is not news. Look at RIMM over the course of a full year and you see the trend is unmistakeably upward (much like AAPL if you ignore that big drop in February/March.) So you have to ask – if their profits doubled then what’s the problem.

The problem is the next three months.

RIMM expect revenue to increase slightly over last quarter but they expect profit to be down (by around 1%). We’re still talking about margins in excess of 50% here but the most telling part, for me, is near the end of the Earnings Call transcript.

Jeffery Kvaal – Lehman Brothers
…to what extent are there other variables about pricing that we should be considering? Are you worried about overlap with the Apple customer base as well?
James L. Balsillie
I think the second half of your question doesnâ€™t have particular relevance to our thinking…
Jeffery Kvaal – Lehman Brothers
Okay, so thanks. That sounds like you arenâ€™t seeing too much of an overlap then, Jim, with the iPhone customer base in particular.
James L. Balsillie
No.

I don’t think they believe him.

BlackBerry has some stiff competition ahead when both the iPhone 3G shipa (in two weeks) and the Android phones begin to ship (speculating year-end). They’ll still do well because they already have a huge installed base and large corporations are not simply going to swap everything over based on these releases. But one of the hardest things on your laurels is resting on them.

I’m not a fan of the BlackBerry and this is based on having to support BlackBerry users when I was in Mac-Sys. I didn’t find the device a pleasure to use and that makes such a difference to me – and I think the realisation that computers don’t have to be awful is being realised by others as well.

The thing that made BlackBerry so compelling in the late 90s is being eroded by modern phones. Even the crappy Nokia I had for a loan phone had email and not enough people see the virtue in a push email system for it to be compelling by itself. And, as Apple and Microsoft have shown, push email is not something exclusive to BlackBerry.

Should RIMM be worried about AAPL?

Yes.

On April 2nd this year, RIMM announced the number of BlackBerry subscribers had passed 14 million – the BlackBerry has been on sale since 1997. To put this in perspective, Apple sold 6 million iPhones in far fewer countries in less than a year and they’re about to sell more than 10 million more.

In the Earnings transcript, James L. Balsillie said:

…once you decide to become a BlackBerry user, you kind of stay there for life.

Considering the 14 million, that’s kinda disappointing.

Top less.

John Gruber writes a short entry about top posting. Top posting is the process where you reply to an email by adding your comments at the top of the email and not editing the content beneath. In many cases it means that you need to scroll to the bottom of the message to get the … Continue reading “Top less.”

John Gruber writes a short entry about top posting.

Top posting is the process where you reply to an email by adding your comments at the top of the email and not editing the content beneath. In many cases it means that you need to scroll to the bottom of the message to get the gist of a conversation.

I agree with John wholeheartedly.

I like to edit down the replies to the smallest amount possible. I like to intersperse my replies to various sections into the meat of the email – though this behaviour is something that completely freaks out email newbies especially if you’re disagreeing with them – they see it as unnecessary nitpicking.

Editing emails down in Outlook is harder and this is the reason that top posting caught on. It’s a lot more effort to attribute text (you have to colour it) and, face it, most people who use Outlook have never and will never pay attention to top-posting etiquette.

This is a rehash of the Rich Text versus ASCII email flamewars. I think to a degree we have to just accept that this is the de facto standard. We can continue to use the behaviours we like but there is no guarantee that we’re going to receive what we like.

That all said.

I top-post.

I top-post when using my iPhone. And this is because it’s the default action and because editing text is hard on tiny devices. The iPhone email application is pretty poor for editing text, there’s no selection, there’s no copy paste. It’s the email client for the Outlook generation.

I’ll leave you to make your own judgement on this.

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