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I bought a Curve for myself, as a personal phone (out of work baby!). I can tell you at least 3 reasons I bought it none of which involve c-level thinking: 1) it's not tied to either Verizon or AT&T (I cause enough bullshit in my own life without the help of these service providers) 2) it looks/feels nice to use and carry 3) decent media player (although I use flipside mostly as my media player) 4) lots of useful application (two of my favorites are midpssh and logicmail).

To make the bb phone even more usable try operamini. Oh, and I've just installed google voice which looks like fun.

Naturally I'll be moving to an android when 1) they look/work a little more iphone/blackberry slick (am I the only one who hates HTC phones?) 2) I can actually afford one.

If RIM could actually do IMAP correctly, LogicMail probably wouldn't exist. "Standards-based", indeed.

When I kicked off my main BlackBerry project, a surprisingly useful app called LogicMail, I had some similar motivations. I basically really wanted something that didn't exist (at least in any usable form) for the platform.

Though instead of trying to commercialize it, I went for the F/OSS route. In retrospect, one could say I was short-changing myself, but there are other very important pieces of the puzzle that you need to consider first.

First of all, the moment you decide to sell an app, you pretty much cut yourself off from any and all possibility of community contribution to the code. In the beginning, its no big deal as no one contributes anyways. But as the project grows, everyone has a pet feature they want and you don't have the time to work on. Often these are low-risk items you don't mind including.

Second, and probably the biggest issue, is support. If you are going to sell an app, you really should be able to confidently stand behind it. You are essentially taking on an obligation to support it and resolve any user issues. This might seem reasonable at first, especially with small apps, self-contained apps, or apps that talk to sufficiently known/standardized servers with highly constrained protocols. But with my sort of app, there were just too damn many variables to consider. I basically had to turn my users into testers, and a beta stage wouldn't have really helped much. There are just too many e-mail servers and encoding formats to catch it all up front.

Finally, having an open source project is kind of like the developer equivalent of having a portfolio. Its an open way you can show what you're capable of, to a degree pretty much impossible with your day job.

Oh, and I do have a day job, and it pays well enough that I really don't need to stress myself to death for a few extra bucks.

BIS pisses me off even more. Why provide an IMAP client when you can force people to provide their login credentials to their honest and trustworthy cell phone carrier? Not to mention that well into 2008 the idea of syncing e-mail (as opposed to POP3 download) was looked at as some sort of freak request. It's not like anyone would want to get their mail from both their phone AND their PC.

Yeah, I wasn't too fond of that either. That's why I decided to go ahead and write my own IMAP/POP client (LogicMail) for the BlackBerry.

Of course now I'm stuck to the BlackBerry, since I do want to continue working on and supporting the app. But overall its been a pretty good experience, albeit way too much of a time sink.

Try again. Two of my favorites are LogicMail (POP/IMAP from anywhere) and MidpSSH (in a pinch, server management) but you can also find more at places like Sourceforge.

It is a shame that he doesn't bother to even mention anything about the BlackBerry platform. First and foremost, it *is* J2ME. (well, for the most part) You can run standard J2ME stuff on the BlackBerry, but you can also run stuff written against the BlackBerry-specific API. RIM provides free development tools, and while their own IDE is pretty poor, integrating their tools with the NetBeans IDE is pretty easy.

The biggest advantage of BlackBerry Java development, IMHO, is that the OS itself is practically a JVM, and the built-in apps are also Java. On most phones, running a J2ME app requires waiting forever for the thing to start and never integrate well. On the BlackBerry, your own Java apps start instantly and can look just like all the other built-in apps. Finally, BlackBerry is a common platform across a wide range of popular devices, so you'll always have plenty of potential users even if you build BlackBerry-specific apps.

And now for the shameless plug...
Back when I got my BlackBerry, I found that there were no decent available E-Mail clients for them. (only the service-based E-Mail, which stinks if you're not hooked to a corporate BIS server.) So, I kicked off an open-source project to write my own:
LogicMail - http://www.logicprobe.org/proj/logicmail

For details, look here.

In the rack:
- Cable modem
- Cisco 4500M+ router
- 1U Netfinity 4000R (650MHz P3) firewall, FreeBSD 6
- Intel NetStructure 470F switch (8 x 1000Base-SX)
- BayStack 450-24T switch (24 x 100Base-TX, 1 x 1000Base-SX)
- Sun Netra T1 105 (360MHz US2i) auth/util server, Solaris 10
- Sun Blade 1000 (2x900MHz US3) e-mail/SunRay/etc. server, Sol 10
- Custom-built 4U PC box (2x600MHz P3) file server, FreeBSD 6
- 3 x APC Smart-UPS (2200, 1400, 700)
- Lightwave ConsoleServer 800 (serial console server)
- Some Dell whizbanger I'm co-lo'ing for a friend.

Oh, and that's just on the 19" equipment rack. I've got a SuSE 10 Linux desktop (Athlon64) on the desk near by, a fiber run across the attic to another 450-24T in my wiring closet (which in turn links to jacks all over my house), Sun Ray thin clients in several rooms, laptops (of course), a network-attached laser printer, etc, etc. It feels pointless to inventory every trinket bought in an afternoon at Best Buy like the parent of this discussion, honestly. I've already only mentioned a subset, and havn't even touched on the stuff I'm not presently using.

I guess one thing that's special about my "massive pile of computing" is that I like to collect some diversity in my equipment. I've got many different OS's, and most of my machines are not PeeCees (none are Macs).

Of course like many of you, I technically have several more machines than are noted. I refer to this as "the pile", and I basically think of it as the computers I could assemble and/or put into service from stuff I have if I needed to. Always nice to have crap laying around when you want to test something.

I guess one thing that's special about my "massive pile of computing" is that I like to collect some diversity in my equipment. I've got many different OS's, and most of my machines are not PeeCees (none are Macs).

Of course like many of you, I technically have several more machines than are noted. I refer to this as "the pile", and I basically think of it as the computers I could assemble and/or put into service from stuff I have if I needed to. Always nice to have crap laying around when you want to test something.

I've used the Super T-Comp before myself. It's a nice board. I've even build my own I/O expansion circuitry for it. Ray also provides full schematics, which were great at learning how such things are designed, and came in handy when I went to expand upon it.

See the Super T-COMP's site:
http://www.teleport.com/~raybutts/index.htm

I read all about this Trinity competition back when I was building my own robot project. I would have entered, had I not lived in Florida.

See my project, Chip II:
http://www.logicprobe.org/~octo/robot/