Blackberry Alternative: 3 heart Nokia

Here’s the thing, Blackberry sure is a great functional product, it creates a new trend and also changed how people interact and behaves. It almost like creating new culture or something close to that. I’m not a user of this gadget, and I have some reasons for that, and here they are:

  • I don’t buy the idea of push mail or push anything. I’d like to have control of things I want to know within certain period of time. It certainly not nice getting an email about your work or got buzzed by your client while you are on a date. Of course you always have a choice to turn this feature off, but then what’s the point of having the gadget? I just like things to be pulled.
  • The point above leads to this point. Autism! Yes it is, every friend that has recently using this gadget, developed this syndrome. It is kinda annoying to hang out with BB users. They just can’t get it off. So what’s the point of hanging out then. I do hope that this is just a fever that will soon be over.
  • And the third point is about the stability of the gadget. There are still bugs here and there, sometimes the screen blinks at you and sometime it reboots itself. This thing is like a beta product. I just don’t like the idea of paying such amount of money for an unstable product.

Apart from the above reason, I think it’s also the nature of myself that are not really mobile. I spent 45% of my time in front of my MacBook Pro, 15% mobile, and the other 40% offline. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I banned this gadget for life, but for now, I won’t be using it. If you have equivalent situation as I do, I’d like to share an alternative to this, and it involves two of our major clients, Hutchison 3 and Nokia.

Here’s how I contain my digital life while I’m mobile. I’m actively using the following services of the internet: Gmail (my office email is also ported to this great service), Facebook, Twitter, Plurk, Ping.fm, Qik, Yahoo! Messenger and YouTube.
I’m using Nokia N81 8GB which has generously given by the client and my cellphone operator is Hutchison 3. This two in tandem is a real something something, the only thing that BB wins over this is the BB Messenger. But, it’s not a big deal for me, cause every BB user also activates Y!M. So this is how it goes:

The new growing trends right now in Indonesia is micro-blogging. For me this includes Facebook’s status update, twitting, and plurking. For this matter, I’m setting up an account in Ping.fm, a social tool that lets you update all your social network status, micro-blogs and blog at once. I’m doing this via Ping.fm wap site, and check and response to my entry via wap as well. Thanks to 3 Value Added Service (VAS), Free 1 MB internet access per day and its economic GPRS tariff.

For the Y!M chat, again 3 has a great flat rate service called YM di Hape. The best thing about this service is, you can have two options of how you want to do it. First one is you can install the official Y!M mobile application, which is very user friendly, unlike other mobile chat application. Secondly, you can have the chat by SMS, which I prefer to. The SMS tariff is included in the flat rate (Rp. 10000/month), so they don’t charge your SMS again.

The only thing I’ve been envying from BB user while back then is Facebook Mobile Upload. I’ve addressed this personal issue to one of 3 VAS Officer and voila they’ve just made it came true. Now with 3, you can upload your recently snapped photo straight from your mobile phone via MMS, write notes, pokes, and stalks your Facebook friend via SMS, all in flat rate.
As I wrote this, the 3 VAS officer is updating me with more promising features of the service.

Blackberry Alternative: 3 Facebook Mobile

All the above activities are done using Nokia N81 8GB handset which has WLAN capability, running S60 OS and not to mention GPS system. The lovely thing being Nokia user is that you get free Wivi access form CBN Hotspot. Services like Qik (Live stream video from your mobile), YouTube - that requires a more stable and broader bandwidth pipe - are usually catered by this Nokia features and priviledge. Amazingly - I’ve just found out - N81 browser is supporting Adobe Flash and flv, which are terrific.

Recently, I’ve installed two new apps in my cellphone, and all by Google. One is Gmail and the other one is Google Latitude. I’ve been using the Gmail app for quite sometimes and it’s very handy while you are out for a meeting. The other one is Google Latitude, which I’m still getting a hang of it.