I am old enough to remember when all you could do with a phone is make a call…heck I remember rotary dial telephones. I think my parents' were the last in the state to get with touchtone. I kept teasing them that the Smithsonian is going to come and confiscate their rotary phone. In the 80's, I had one of those "mobile phones" there were the size of a loaf of bread, and weighed about...

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I spent a fair amount of time on the phone with Leslie Brooks Suzukamo, Telecom, Technology and Energy Reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Our topic of discussion? Whether the new Apple iPhone is going to be a good business phone or not. He quoted various industry sources and so-called pundits who predicted that it wouldn't and that it's designed exclusively for consumers. But he -- and they -- are so terribly wrong......

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I saw your entry about how to filter incoming Blackberry email so you don't drown in the trivial, but I have a different question: how I can set up a vacation hold, a way to completely disable all email notification without actually shutting down my account? I'm going on a long-weekend to Mexico and don't want to pay data roaming charges for email I don't care about anyway!...

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I don't get it, I have a new Blackberry Pearl and have been enjoying getting used to its predictive typing system, SureType, but all of a sudden my phone is now into the same annoying multiple-keypress input system that my pre-Pearl phone forced me to use. How do I switch back to the predictive SureType system?...

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I've been experimenting with mencoder to convert my AVI movies into a format that I can download onto my cellphone and finally found a site where they explain the various parameters needed for the mencoder program to get it to work. Problem is, they're a pain to type in each time. How do I turn an ugly command line invocation into a nice shell script?...

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Since you seem to be delving into the world of the Blackberry Pearl with your Mac system, I was hoping you could tell me how to use the Pearl as a wireless (bluetooth) modem with my Mac OS X Powerbook system. Didja figure that one out yet, Dave?...

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I just bought a Blackberry Pearl, figuring it's the best phone out there until the Apple iPhone arrives, and am pleased with its ability to "push" email out to me anywhere, tapping into my main email account. Problem is, lots of my email is from lists where I don't need to actually be notified in real time, they're just for me to file for later. Can I filter or otherwise tweak Blackberry email on my...

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I just got a shiny new Blackberry 8100 Pearl phone and it's all working fine, except I am hitting an error when I try to use Google's Gmail mobile app: "net.rim.device.app.systemControlledAccessException: Missing RCC signature. Not allowed to access Certicom functionality." What the heck does that mean and what do I need to do with my Cingular Pearl to get it working with Gmail?...

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