The good news for me is that now it is a ton easier to post to my blog using my Samsung Blackjack. Wordpress 2.5 has redesigned the blog entry screen so that it is much easier to get to typing posts. Before Wordpress 2.5, I had to scroll past an extremely long list of Categories to get to the part of the page where you type your entry. Normally, when I log into my site I am on a full-sized computer that displays webpages correctly. On a big computer, my extraordinarily long list of Categories are hidden in a pull down menu. My phone’s browser isn’t powerful enough to display my dashboard correctly and just stacks each Category one on top of the other.

“What’s a Category?” Great question. If you look just under the title of each blog entry you will see some blue words that categorize that story. Wordpress doesn’t limit how many categories I use and obediently remembers every one I have ever used. The list is crazy long.

Now, I don’t have to deal with that list when posting from my phone. Upgrade!

Now if I could just figure out how to type faster on this tiny keyboard…

– Update–

I am on my laptop now so I am kind of cheating, but I had to give a quick update about completing my entry.  After I typed up my blog entry, I clicked done which launched me back to my dashboard window.  I still had to scroll past the some 150+ categories except now it is not as bad because I am now seeing all these categories after I typed the entry.  With the blog article still fresh on my mind, I can categorize it more effectively.  So, I still have to scroll a lot, only now it is more profitable.

Wow, finally I can post to my blog from my phone easily. I just uploaded a new plugin called wphone, and it seems to be working really well. I have tried to blog from my phone somewhat successfully but because I have used all sorts of different categories or tags or whatever you want to call them I had to scroll like 15 minutes to get to the window to enter the post. Needless to say, I didn’t want to put myself very often so I didn’t post much from my phone. Now if I could just speed up my thumb typing, all would be good in the world.

If you want to hack your iPhone to work on other GSM based cell networks, and you are trying to go the hardware hack route then be careful because apparently the iPhone will quickly transform from your friendly, sexy phone into a Bic lighter.

Check out this article on Engadget about a guy who basically lit $699 on fire!

I mean… is AT&T really that bad??

What what?? I am posting this using my cell phone as a modem. I finally got it to work! I tried for over an hour unsuccessfully to get my computer to see the Internet through my phone. It wasn’t until I went into the settings of the phone and change the USB’s default settings to ‘Modem’ instead of ‘ActiveSync’. Here is how I did it.

Before You Do Anything…
In order to use you AT&T 3G phone as a modem, you have to download AT&Ts Communication Manager. Normally, I try not to use third-party connection management programs because they are usually poorly written. In this case, you need it because it installs the correct drivers and creates the needed dial-up setting.

I have done some testing, once I installed the AT&T Communication Manager, I connected to the Internet without it, and my Samsung Blackjack kept dropping the connection. Once I turned the Communication Manager back on and used it to connect to the net, all was fine.

After you have the AT&T CM installed, you need to make these changes to your phone:

1. Click the ‘Start’ Button on the phone.
2. Click on ‘Settings”
3. Click on ‘Connections’
4. Click on ‘USB’
5. Set the ‘USB Connection setting:’ to ‘Modem’*
6. Open the AT&T Communication Manager Program on your computer
7. BEFORE you connect you phone, click on ‘Device Wizard’ in the ‘Tools’ Menu
8. Follow the instructions in the wizard.
9. Once connected to you phone, click the ‘Connect’ button in the AT&T Communication Manager and then…Boom, you should be up and running!!!!

* If you use ActiveSync, your phone will warn you that ActiveSync will no longer work. Just remember to change your USB back to ‘ActiveSync’ before you try to sync again.

I also went into the task manager and turned off the ActiveSync program just for good measure.

After I did these things, the AT&T Connection Manager saw the phone as a Modem and voila… here I am blogging using the phone as my connection to the tubes!!!

What a deal…

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I just tested the speed, and they are comparable to what I was seeing the other night when I tested the speed using the browser on the phone itself. I am getting around 750kbps down and 120 kbps up. Plenty fast for blogging and email and light browsing. I am ecstatic!

If you have any interest in smart phones, especially Palm-based ones, then you need to read this incredibly thoughtful post from engadget. It was posted way back on August 21st, and a lot of you who actually keep up with your RSS feeds have already read or at least heard about this post, but it is incredible.

Peter Rojas, Ryan Block, and Joshua Topolsky have done an exceedingly good job at calling Palm to the mat on their lack of innovation, and ridiculous grip on past successes.

I have a lot of friends who have Treos, and all of them have MAJOR complaints about their phone, and the scary thing is Palm doesn’t seem to know that they are quickly becoming irrelevant.

I remember 4 years ago when Treos were all the rage. They were an exceptional answer to the lack of choice in the email phone market. Blackberries were great if all you did was email. I knew a number of people who carried Blackberries and a separate phone. Treo answered that problem. The issue is Palm hasn’t done very much since then, and all their competitors have.

There are a ton of sexy, thin smartphones out there, and people would have to be stupid to invest in a Treo now. Palm has to do something, and Engadget is calling them on it, and I applaud them.

Sorry this post is so late compared to the original article. I have been incredibly busy…too busy to blog.

Engadget is reporting with “100% certainty” that a group of 6 guys who call themselves the iPhoneSIMfree.com team has made it possible to unlock the iPhone from AT&T and use it with any GSM carrier.

For those of us in the US, this isn’t that big of a deal. The only other GSM carrier of note is T-mobile, and they have their issues just like AT&T… mobile users just have to pick which issues they can deal with and go with that carrier.

The people who profit the most from this news are people outside of the United States. Many countries will never see the iPhone, and the ones that will, won’t be seeing it anytime soon…until now.

The iPhoneSIMfree.com team seems to have found an unreversible way to unlock the iPhone which is great news to us, the consumer. Products should be free. We should be able to purchase electronics and use them wherever and however we want to. These lock-in contracts break the fabric of our free-market system, and leads to artificially inflated prices and functionality-poor devices.

If real market forces are thwarted through monopolistic practices then the gray market will force the hand of the players involved.

I am an AT&T customer, and I don’t plan on buying an iPhone, but I still see this as very interesting news, and I am anxious to see how this all plays out.

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Now playing: Nouvelle Vague - Friday Night Saturday Morning

I surfed on over to DSL Reports on my cell phone and did a speed test on my new 3G connection. I was very interested to see what types of speed were possible. I did the test a number of times, and it averaged out at around 750 Kbits per second. It took around 7 to 10 seconds to download a 1 MB file.

That is pretty exciting. It isn’t nearly as fast as my cable internet, but for the things that you do on your phone, that is plenty of speed.

I was excited to find some videos to watch, but because cingular changed to the “new AT&T” (not a fan of that…) the urls that lead to videos that are baked into the phone no longer work. My phone looks for the cingular mobile site that no longer exists…has anyone there ever heard of a redirect. That is a major oversight. Boo on you AT&T.

Add to that, there are a ton of markets who’ve had 3G for a long time. I am glad that we finally have it, but it is about dang time!!

All in all, I am pretty pleased with the service, but we shall see in the coming months how I like it over time.

Well, the wait is over and come 5:00 central time the first iPhones will go on sale. The caveat is that you will have to be in the eastern time zone. Apple has decided that there will be a rolling roll-out for the iPhone. They will go on sale at 6:00 pm in every timezone.

Right now, I am watching a live stream on justin.tv of a high school student who is waiting in line at a store in San Francisco.

It is interesting, and I am looking forward to what the fallout will be once these phones are out in the wild, but I am not going to get one. I believe that there will be some negative press following the release of the iPhone, but I still want to see one.

I think I will go around after work and see if there are people waiting to purchase the iPhone here in Northwest Arkansas.