Checking in...

(Reposted from old blog)

Summer has been crazy, so I haven’t been working on my personal projects as much, which means I’m not updating as much, but two things are going to change that, well actually one thing…sort of…

First, I’m up for my Verizon upgrade on the 25th and I’ll be buying myself a BlackBerry(tm) smartphone. After much thought I’ve decided I’m going to go with the BlackBerry Curve 8330 model, as it has all the goodies I want (3.5 mm audio jack instead of headset jack, a camera instead of VZW crippled GPS, etc).

This sucker will be replacing my damaged Samsung A870 phone, and my aging and damaged Dell Axim X30 PDA. I swear neither damage was my fault. The phones outer display froze in a freak ice rain storm at school and the PDAs memory card slot was damaged by an uninformed friend of mine deciding her Sony MemoryStick was going in there whether or not it wanted to.

Anyway, this means I’ll be posting about it a lot once I get it and figure out all its cool toys, current plans for it include:

• Mobile blogging, which is where my next bit of news comes in
• Streaming internet radio through the Moodio project
• Mobile Instant Messaging and SMS, and obviously email
• 8GB of extra flash memory so I can carry this in place of my iPod most of the time
• Beyond 411
• Viigo for RSS feeds

I’ll be running on Verizon’s consumer BlackBerry(tm) Internet Service plan, which is an additional $29.99 a month for “Unlimited” data usage. There are rumors that it gets capped at 5GiB but as I’m not going to using the device as a tethered cellular modem I find it so unlikely I’ll hit that much data in a single month that I’m not terribly concerned.

Now on to the other exciting news… Thanks to my girlfriend and her father, I’m going to be joining them on a vacation to the Walt Disney World resort in early August, and I intend to photoblog the entire trip here using the camera and mobile broadband internet access the BlackBerry(tm) has. So expect lots of activity, pictures and posting as I finally cut the last of my cords and go truly wireless!