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Today was the day of days. I drove from my office to the Glendale Cingular store, plunked down some money, will pay an early termination fee on Sprint, and I bought a Blackberry 8700c. Oh, and a pink razr for the wife.

I know, I know.

I wrote an article, that my friend Merlin linked to, about how much I loved my PPC-6700 from Sprint. I had used it to such an extent that it became a remote avatar of my digital life. This extension that fit in my hand, providing me a connection to the immaterial world that so consumes my life. It lead to friends, indie rock star acquaintances and more than a few trackbacks.

And now I have to say that the device that is my portable avatar has moved from a big MIcrosoft device to a moderately large RIM device. THe reasons are many, but are concentrated in the following:

1) Battery life. The PPC-6700 was around 6 hours. The 8700c is 2 days.
2) Screen readability outside – nil on the 6700, very nice on the 8700c
3) Stability

Basically, the 6700 is a brilliant device, but its a Windows device. It is very flashy, cool to show people, and HTC did an amazing job on the build quality. But 2-3 soft resets a day, lots and lots of screen delays, etc leads up to the realization that you are essentially relying on an underpowered, large, power-hungry Windows machine for your phone. It seems silly when you think of it like that.

So the 6700 will be ebayed (it makes a killer EVDO modem or GPS device) and my 8700c is now all pretty on my desk (along with a Motorola H700 headset).

So lets recap, and move forward. More than two months later, how is My So Called Digital Life shaping up.

E-Mail

The volume of e-mail I get daily has not decreased. In fact, because things are going rather well with work, they have radically increased, and increased in monetary value. By monetary value, I mean that the potential money earned from each e-mail (for the company, etc) has gone up to the point where one e-mail can pay for a year of remote e-mail access, sync services, scornful looks, etc.

To wit: I get upwards of 500 actionable e-mails a day. That does not count the automated status updates from our ticketing system, or the various things I monitor pinging me to tell me that they executed their cron jobs OK.My e-mail all funnels into a Mailstreet hosted Exchange account. I used to funnel it into a 4smartphone account, but they don’t support BlackBerry Enterprise Service, so I had to give it up (sorry!). This doesn’t mean I don’t like 4smartphone though. After some scalability issues, they have gotten much better.Above, you can see my current e-mail organization. I have decided to go the zero-inbox route, and maintain a clear head through a clear inbox. The contents of these folders is self explanatory, I should hope. INBOX items go into Archive if there is nothing more to do on them, Followup if I need to respond, and Reference if the e-mail contains things that I need to keep handy. This includes travel itineraries, receipts, new account activations, etc.

The Blackberry is used in a similar fashion. I keep its inbox cleaned by filing into folders. To do so, I had to mark those folders as Redirected in the Blackberry desktop client. Once I did that, messages I file on the computers (in Entourage or Mail) are on the Blackberry. Unfortunately it doesn’t apply to pre-BES messages, so I’ll need to do a resync on Apple Mail later.

The zero-count inbox has worked really well for me, in terms of making sure I can keep focused and not be so consumed by what I MUST do, that I avoid doing anything.

Calendar

As I’m still using an Exchange server, you’d think I’d still use Groupcal, from Snerdware. You would be wrong! Groupcal is a really crappy product, and I’m very sad that I spent upwards of $120.00 on it. Instead, I’m now happy that Entourage uses iSync to sync to Address Book and iCal. This works really well surprisingly, complete with invites and such.