greg hughes - dot net

Have no idea what it means in either context...do have a question about your BBerry though.

That looks like a 3290. Who is your provider and have you noticed reception problems vs other Blackberries/phones?

Hi Alex - It's a 7290 model from Cingular - the one with color screen and bluetooth capabilities.

We run around 50 Blackberries and they are very consistent as far as reception goes, and compared to other types of phones they tend to be equal or even slightly better in same cases. Since this is a quad-band GSM/GPRS phone, the coverage is much better than the older-style Blackberry devices like the 857 and 957 (original non-phone models).

In fact, I recently tried a bunch of other phone devices and returned to the 7290:

http://www.greghughes.net/rant/PhonePDAEmailDevicesOnceYouveHadBlackberry.aspx

- greg

Sorry, 7290 is what I meant.

Interesting. All of the quad-band phones I have tried through T-Mobile have had much worse reception than the tri-band blackberries like the 7730.

Couldn't even get the 7290 or 7100T to find the proper network in our building.

Sounds like the design doesn't favor the band that T-Mobile is using for their GSM network (1800 for T-Mobile vs 850 for Cingular).

Thanks,

Alex

Ah, yes - the in-building coverage problem. We actually just finished a three-month review of the mobile providers available here, and while T-Mobile's pricing was attractive, their coverage was lacking outside the metro area. Verizon and Cingular have the coverage pretty well nailed down compared to the competition, but they all have frustrating gaps and spots.

So - if you have an in-building signal problem, you're sometimes better off solving that specific problem than trying to find a carrier that happens to have a strong signal.

Call (and surf over to) http://www.spotwave.com/ - I have used their devices, which are quite good, for a couple years now, and they've made refinements and improvements since then. If you're looking to outfit a team, it may be worth the small-ish investment.

I am also told that there is an IP-based device coming to the market that acts as a mini indoor coverage site - you can just plug it into your Internet connection and it "talks" back to the carrier via VPN or similar. But the carriers are staying pretty tight-lipped about availability right now for some reason.

THATS RIGHT MY FRIEND, its about time you putr that shit on your phone. so have you ah.... well ya know.....seen the movie yet? i hope so.