About a month ago my Blackberry 7290 quit getting reliable reception. I’d never had any problems with the phone up until then and even when I was visiting Atlanta it wouldn’t let me talk more than 45 seconds or so without dropping calls. I took it into Cingular and they tried to get me to renew my service and get a more modern blackberry. While the phone made a lot of sense while I was at GE, I really didn’t need a wallet phone anymore. So I went looking on ebay…

There were only two requirements, one of which I could deal without if I found the right phone. Mainly I wanted something that worked well with my mac via bluetooth, and the other was a keyboard for text messaging(yes the blackberry spoiled me). Most of my friends with Motorol Razrs hate them, and the other ‘popular’ phones were either more than I wanted to spend or pushing features I didn’t foresee myself using very often. I remembered my friend Roy hyping up bluephoneelite a while back, so I looked at what phones would work well with it. One of their well supported phones looked really dope, a Motorola A630. I found one on ebay, brand new, for a little more than 100$. Wow oh wow, I’m absolutely hooked on bluephoneelite. It’s so dope when I get a phone call, the caller id is displayed on-screen, and my itunes pauses when I answer it. It’ll put my machine into screensaver mode and shuts off itunes when I walk out of range. Equally cool is when it starts it back up when I walk back in range. :) They’re really really simple interactions with my computer that are just convenient. I love it.

Syncing my contacts from my Blackberry wasn’t as straight forward as I thought it’d be. Unfortunately the A630 doesn’t work with isync by default. PocketMac did a decent job of putting all of my blackberry contacts into my mac address book, isync just refused to connect to my a630. I found a great write-up on syncing the a630 with isync on macosxhints and now all is well.