Ryan's Journal

To continue the saga, the trackball button on my BlackBerry has stopped acting as a button. This keeps me from using my normal GPS tracking software, which is mostly bad programming (the native OS provides about three ways to click a dialog button, this software only uses the trackball), but really, a button's not supposed to go bad after only five months of being pushed. It's a two-year contract, I'm not looking to replace the phone at all in that time frame.

And it's something of a rip-off now, because I really should have just gotten a refurbished phone at the outset for free. Warrantied replacement phones? Refurbished.

I've now gone through four in five months. Along with the user experience of being a bad flashback to pre-Mac days, the hardware coming out of RIM seems pretty unreliable.

Thanks to another party, I am using a Mac-friendly Sony Ericsson Z750 as a 3G modem. With no hard data in hand, the speeds via USB cable seem to approximate what I expect from most domestic wifi, minus a little bit. The only drawbacks are a tendency to not charge while plugged in, sometimes running the battery to empty, and a lack of 3G coverage in the rural west. Signal's sparse out there anyways. A few days without Internet didn't kill me. Yet.

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