For weeks I had been having a problem with one of the two CableCard OCUR tuners in my Vista Media Center PC. A fee weeks ago, I decided to try an figure out what the problem was. My testing revealed that one tuner worked fine all the time, but that the other would stop tuning anything but clear QAM (unencrypted digital cable channels that generally carry local broadcast channels) channels after a few hours. If I either powered down the tuner (via the web interface) or removed and reinserted the card, I could once again tune all of my cable channels, but then after a few hours I would be back to only being able to tune clear QAM channels.

Because the problem would be solved after reinserting the CableCard, two visits from Comcast resulted in some tweaks to my cabling and some new cable splitters, but the problem would always recur shortly after they left.

I posted on The Green Button, any received the opinion that the problem likely lay in a bad CableCard. So with my third visit from Comcast, I insisted they install a new CableCard. That seems to have done the trick as the four days after the new card was installed all OCUR tuners still tune all channels.

This evening I tried using Orb with the Bold on my 20 minute train ride home from work in downtown Chicago. I was pleased to find that Orb worked. But AT&T’s network was not a match for Sprint’s and the quality of the podcast I was listening to suffered repeatedly. Unlike when using Orb with Windows Mobile, however, the network connection never broke so badly that I needed to manually resume listening to the podcast. Both were suboptimal experiences, but with the Bold the issue seems to be more with AT&T’s network than with the Bold itself.

Having found that I would need to continue to sync podcasts to the Bold, I tried connecting it via USB cable to a Vista PC in our house to see if I could sync it directly with J River Media Center. I found that I could! Upon connection, Vista found drivers for the Blackberry and recognized the Bold. Plug and Play. Likewise I could easily transfer photos from the Bold to my PC using Windows Live Photo Gallery. The Bold’s microSD card and internal memory both show up as standard removable drives when the bold is connected with a USB cable. In my mind, this is a Big improvment over ActiveSync which for me was fraught with problems: it would often just stop working and the device would need to be repaired and resync’d. So often in fact that I would seldom bother to connect the device to a PC using ActiveSync (instead I would sync music files to the removable SD card).

I had been planning to get one of the new iPhones when the come out in June, but I fear having to start using iTunes. The Bold’s more conventional connection to Windows makes me more inclined to keep using the Bold.

A few more observations after a few more days of use:

• The media player application crashes every couple of days. This is significantly more frequent than any crashes in Windows Mobile 6.0.
• When I turn on my Bluetooth headset. Unlike Windows Mobile, there is no tone generated by the Blackberry that lets me know I have a good connection.
• My A2DP Bluetooth dropout problems appear to improve if fewer applications are running, especially if the “Phone” app is not running.
• The only Windows Mobile app I miss is ListPro, but I will try SplashShopper to see if that gets me the listkeeping functionality I liked in ListPro.
• If I have chosen “column view” in the Blackberry web browser, that setting is not persistent after following a link, meaning it needs to be reset with every page. This is annoying, but would be more so if the trackball weren’t a pretty good way to get around web pages that are bigger than the Blackberry screen’s horizontal dimension.

Although, I find the Blackberry browser generally better than that in Windows Mobile 6, it is really annoying that there are many pretty simple pages that can’t be used at all to enter data or make selections from dropdown boxes. I’m looking at you Zefty.com.

A few days before our recent trip to Europe, I decided that I needed PDA/Phone that I could use overseas on the trip. Our MIS department set me up with a new Blackberry Bold and I have no intention of going back to my HTC Mogul on the Sprint network. My firm pays for the data plan, so that isn’t an issue for me. Here are some of my initial thoughts on the Bold, in no particular order:

• It is great having a phone and internet connection on a phone I can use overseas.
• The trackball generally works great for navigating—as well or better than a stylus or touch screen. I occasionally miss scroll bars, however.
• In general, the browser on the Bold works as well or better than that on my Windows Mobile 6 phone.
• But… I find myself unable to download large files or web pages getting an error that the requested amount of data is too large.
• The A2DP stereo Bluetooth connection is not as solid as that I experienced with the HTC Mogul. Often, I will get dropouts when the phone is in my pocket. This problem seems to be lessened significantly, if I am not running any application other than the music player.
• The lack of native support for reading scanned PDF files is somewhat annoying.

More later…