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Over the past several years the reason some of us buy phones has changed. 10 years ago, you pretty much bought a phone from the carrier that worked in your area. Some of us in smaller towns did not have much choice. Either way most phones you bought about looked the same. As the years have passed, form factor, call quality, camera, and battery life have been factors that way in on us.

With the success of the iPhone I think many companies are currently looking at mobile browsers. T-Mobile customers may not be familiar with this new world, but soon will be with a 3G network finally launching. Example if I went to Myspace on my old Samsung A640, I would get nothing accomplished, I probably would not even to be able to tell who my top friends were. The iPhone has one of the best browsers(Safari Mobile) which allows you to get the desktop experience on your phone.

The next best browser in my opinion is Opera Mini and if if is available on your phone you should download it. It allows you to view many things on your phone and allows you a secure connection to do mobile banking. (Thanks Joe).

So Firefox is getting into the mobile browser business. It is currently my favorite browser, sorry IE8, Opera, Google Chrome, and Safari. It introduced me to tabbed browsing and has a lighter footprint than other browsers. So I am a big Firefox fan, and I am hoping they launch on Blackberry, that would be so awesome. Either way I am looking forward to it and for those of you who do not have Opera Mini and have a phone that supports it, DOWNLOAD IT!!! You will be happy you did.

Last time we covered some of the annoying habits we have picked up, or some of the bad habits we need to get rid of. Thanks to this article it has given us a great guide to what we should or should not do.

5. Texting while you are driving. Not only is this a good way to mis-spell a lot of your words while you are typing, but it is a very dangerous thing to do. I am guilty of it, and I have really tried to stop. It is really dangerous. I am usually aware of what is going on around me while I am driving, but texting really takes you out of the game. Not just texting, but e-mailing, Twitter, and so on.

4. Checking your phone at the movies. At Cinemark (The only theater in my town) Front Row Joe says no calling or texting during the movie. It really is annoying when the person at the movies is constantly checking their phone. If you have something so important to tend to, tend to it and skip the movie.

3. Interrupting a conversation by taking a call. This is self-explanatory, most of us have voice-mail for a reason. Let your voice mail pick up. You do not need to stop your conversations to answer every call.

2. Inappropriate Language/Conversation. Nobody wants to know what you did last night with your friends, or how you don’t remember after a certain point. Not only that, but it seems like when you have these conversations they are 10 times louder than a regular conversation. A good rule of thumb is to pretend small children or elderly folks are around.

1. Talking to loudly. This went with number two for me, but you do not have to put your conversation on anybody an a 100 foot radius. I am glad you are important, but I do not care if your pet squirrel zippy is sick, and I do not think the other people at Walgreen’s do either.

So that’s it, a few good rules to not do. Good luck breaking some of these habits if you have them. It is hard, but it is possible. Good luck!!!

I came across this fun article and thought I would share some basic cell phone etiquette rules. We all have our personal pet peeves for cell phones and what people should do and should not do with them . It is really funny my father in law hated that I used my phone for e-mail, games, music, new, and so on. He had a really simple ATT phone, and now he has the pleasure of using his Verizon Blackberry with his new job. I think he has seen the light!!!

So anyways here are 6-10.

10. Location There are places where you should use your phone and should not. Of course the movies is one place you shouldn’t. It does not matter how important you are, you can run out and take the phone call.

9. Disturbing Performances I love going to comedy shows and I have on a few occasions seen a person take/make a call during the routine. It is rude, and gives the comedian an extra target to go after. Save yourself the embarrassment and send a text, or leave the room.

8. Ringtones This is a hard one to gauge because everybody has really different tastes and what I feel may be appropriate may not be for you. SO here are my general rules. Do not have a ringtone with curse words when children or elderly people may hear it. Make sure your ringtone is quiet or appropriate for the work environment if you are at work.  You are not at the club you are at your job, so maybe Lil’ Wayne is not he best choice.

7. Texing insignificant conversations I hate it when somebody texts me “Hey”, I reply “What’s going on?” and they say “Nothing”. That is the whole conversation, there is nothing else said, you just made me type on my phone twice for nothing. Give me something significant to reply to.

6. Writing a text or e-mail while somebody is talking to you This is a hard one for me. I have my Blackberry and with it I take pride in responding quickly to e-mails. This becomes a problem when I am visiting with an employee or a customers. I want to reply, but I do not want them to think I am ignoring them. So I go with my instinct and either excuse myself to briefly reply to an important e-mail, or silence my phone and continue my conversation.

So I will continue the list tomorrow and hopefully you are not guilty of the top 5. It is fun to see what we do and do not do.

Our phones do so much for us now. Some of us do online banking, read our local newspapers with RSS Feeds, and a million other things. The Apple iPhone(3G) really upped the ante, by giving us a cool all in one device that looked nice and was pretty functional. Don’t get me wrong I love my Blackberry 8830, but the iPhone has really become a very popular multi-faceted device.

So I was reading that cameras will be getting another boost in the near future in cell phones. Of course this is an evolutionary thing and was bound to happen, but with 32GB SD cards becoming available at retail, our phone will soon also be our camera and our multi-media device. It is bound to happen, and when our kids get older and have these all in one devices they will make fun of us for carrying 5 things around.

So we are not where I hope we will be yet, but I can squeeze hours of entertainment out of my Blackberry when I need to. I know people can do the same with iPhones and high end Nokias, Helio Oceans, and so on. If you have an iPhone sync your Itunes and put some music on there, or use the great Roxio media manager for your Blackberry and let it convert your files for you.

So hopefully next year, I will be writing this blog on my phone, uploading high resolution pictures to Myspace, and be able to use a super intuitive interface to control all my media.

.teFor me the Blackberry is about as close to perfect as you can get. I have had other phones, and I am not knocking “dumb” phones because they did serve me well. A Blackberry, in my case the 8830, does most things I want a device to do. It makes my calls, has my e-mails, calendar, music, videos, pictures, web-browsing, and so on.

With all the great things they do and they have there are a few minor issues that have some fairly simple fixes. I had something called Memory Leak that prevented me from receiving new text messages. Something happens where your phones internal memory starts dwindling. The easiest way I have fixed it is deleting some old text messages, make sure I do not have 100 applications running, and take the battery out and put it back in. If you are not a fan of taking your battery out, you can press ALT, THE Right SHIFT Key, and DELETE. I do it twice in a row, so I can be rebooted.

The good folks at Crackberry.com put together a great list on some other common issues and easy fixes. Check it out, if you have any questions or need any other human help, contact us.

We have written a few times about the Samsung Instinct (M-800). It has always been a phone we have anticipated and one I was really looking forward to coming out. It won a few best in shows at some tech conventions earlier this year and we had seen some videos on its performance. The question is did it deliver. The short answer is yes.

The Instinct has been out for some time, and being in the retail world I feel like I can assume it has stood the test of time. It has sold to many many people, and there are not any significant, or even small issues I have faced when dealing with this device. As we all know the iPhone is a media darling. The iPhone is cool, don’t get me wrong, but when you compare it to a more competent device it does not stand up.

In my opinion the biggest issues with the iPhone are the battery, “3g” network, and case fractures. The battery being removable is a bummer, but the real dagger in the heart is the battery life when you are in 3g mode or you have Wi-Fi on. The 3g network with ATT is not as large as Sprint or Verizon, and for such a beautiful device you will probably get small fractures in the plastic shell of your iPone soon after you purchase.

So yes, I think the Instinct is the winner. It is a great device, very responsive, and Sprint has this cool website for more comparisons (I like the music in the removable battery video). If you have not seen an Instinct yet check it out, or contact us and we will gladly set you up with one.

I love my Blackberry, but since it is completely wireless I usually do not connect it to my computer and see some of the other stuff it is compatible with. This weekend I was determined to get some movies on my Blackberry.

I have Blackberry Desktop Manager 4.5. I can change the option to synchronize, transfer data from a device to a Blackberry, load applications, backup and restore, and manage my media. This particular version has Roxio Media Manager. Anyways, I was ready to have to Google how to convert files and “hack” my Blackberry to play my media back the way I wanted. I dragged the media to the Media Manager and Roxio did the rest. It asked if I wanted to Convert for Optimal Playback, I checked yes. And a few minutes later I was done. So no extra work required, just drag and drop.

Soon after I was watching Gotham Knight on my phone, I had a ton of music, and was easily able to put my daughter’s cutest pictures on my phone. So I love that my Blackberry helps me save so much time, but I also love that it helps me pass the time as well. As always any questions contact us.

I love my Blackberry and everything I can do on it. I can write and receive all of my e-mails in a very organized way, I can use a great phone, I can play games, and it seems with all the applications out there I can do a countless number of things. There are so many applications out there and one I am sure many business people have been waiting for is a Quickbooks application.

Now, I am not in charge of finances for our company, but I know that Quickbooks is a very important tool to make sure we are keeping track of all of our expenses and profits. Thanks to our good friends over at Blackberry Cool, they have let us know this is available for Blackberry and iPhone users.

So for those of you that manage your company’s expenses or those of you small or medium business owners that do it yourself, download this application now. On top of the hour a day Blackberry helps you save, this should make your life just a little easier. If you do not have a Blackberry TAKE THE CHALLENGE!

I am always looking for ways to help increase my productivity, or just generally looking for cool new ways to do things on the computer or my phone. With that said one of my most commonly visited websites is LifeHacker. Most articles related to Lifehacker have to deal with PC shortcuts and cool web applications to make life easier. I read about a very helpful mobile tool that should help many people.

The tool they wrote about was BitPim. BitPim is basically an application that allows you to backup your data on many regular phones. If you have a Blackberry, Treo, or Windows Mobile Device, backing up data usually means connecting to your computer with USB or the device does it by itself wirelessly. With regular phones these tasks are not so simple. Thankfully there are backup tools like “Wireless Backup” that Sprint is offering that helps back up contacts, but what if you need a little more?

With BitPim it can back up most of your data, help synchronize your calendars, and even help you put ringtones on your phone. As far as I know there are not many other products out there that do this. Make sure you read the article, because there are very detailed instructions of what you need to do. So try it out and see if it works for you. There are some phones that need a special cable and if you need to order one contact us.  Or if you are ready for a Smartphone let us know and we will help you out!

As you all know we really like cool phones with our company, and it is hard for anything to compete with Blackberry in our hearts unless it is super awesome. I have always like the HTC Touch phone because of the TouchFlo or MediaFlo interface it has. It has always been a cool phone, and a nice small touch screen phone for business users.

Now there were some problems with the HTC Touch and HTC Mogul when they came out, but some of the carriers like Sprint put out software upgrades to give them faster internet and patch some of the issues. So now that those problems have been resolved, what is the next step. Make a great functioning phone that looks awesome as well.

The Touch Diamond is the non QWERTY sister of the two. It looks to have a really cool interface, a 3.2 Mega-pixel camera, tons of on board storage (4 GB for current versions), and a slew of other features. I would recommend checking this video out to see what I am talking about.

The Touch Pro is the QWERTY sister. It has all similar features, and if the QWERTY is anything like the Mogul’s it will be awesome. I have felt HTC has always been a very innovative company, and we do not get to see many of their really awesome phones here in the U.S. From what I have read they will be making a stronger push this year and next year with their marketing to make it more of a name here. So HTC makes good phones and I think they listen to their customers by making improvements people ask for, as well as giving us awesome features we did not know could exist.

I doubt I will give up my Blackberry, but these two phones coming to Sprint are making me entertain the idea. If you have not become a Blackberry Addict yet TAKE THE CHALLENGE!