Joe and Jamie's Blog

Do you hate when you have a voicemail? I do. I just hate the fact that I have to waste time calling into the voicemail system, entering my pin which it always says is wrong the first time I enter it (which you can see from the screen its clearly correct), and then waiting for it to give me all the envelope information just to get to the pointless four minute voicemail full of things that could have been sent to me in an email. I love the ones where people reiterate what they just emailed.

Why does this topic come up? Well for one I had to clear out my voicemail box today. The bigger reason is this article I read from the New York Times. The article has some interesting stats on how voicemail rarely checked and becoming more of a thing of the past, but emails and text messages are read and answered within minutes of receipt. I always thought that if VoIP phones can translate a voicemail into an email and send it to you, why can’t cell phones do this? Speech to text has been around for years, why don’t we put it to some more good use?

This weekend I installed the latest update for my Palm Treo 700wx. I recently had to hard reset the phone back to factory defaults because I lost my picture messaging account. I remembered there was a 1.22 update months ago that I did, so I logged on the Palm site to download it again. Wee to my surprise there was a new 1.24 update that came out in December.

Now I love my Treo, but I also hate it. There were many things that irritated me about it. Once I saw that this update upgraded me from Windows Mobile 5 to 6 I was like a kid in a candy store. I said to myself “I bet they fixed a whole bunch of stuff I hated”. I actually was right for once, they fixed many things indeed. I like how there is even an option to do Windows Updates right on your phone!

The update to Windows Mobile 6 has made my email not lock up the whole phone while it was syncing, internet browser now displays pages better. Programs seem to run smoother, it has the new look of Vista without the performance loss (can’t they do that on the desktops too?), and they made solitaire look prettier!!! They also expanded what types of Office files it could open, and updated it to be compatible with Office 2007.

There was one thing that I did not like at all, which actually was pretty vital to me. They removed Terminal Serivces (Remote Desktop). I used that all the time to get on servers during emergencies while I was off watching a soccer game or at the mall or something. I dug deep into this wondering why Microsoft would get rid of that technology. I found out Microsoft made it one of those optional components for the cell phone providers, and that almost all providers chose not to add it to the phones. Big mistake I would say, there are many, many people not happy with this. Luckily I found something that places terminal services back on your phone, and is updated to work with Vista/Server 2008 computers too. You can obtain the download here.