Brulog

Is the BlackBerry Bold 9900 RIM's best device yet?

Thanks to our friends at RIM as part of our Select Alliance membership, we get sent the latest pre-release BlackBerry's to test our Police mobile applications on.

This is normally difficult for us because our Police applications can only run on CESG accredited device operating systems. Something that takes RIM 6-12 months to achieve. So testing on latest devices as soon as they are available is not a high priority for us.
Instead I have been using the BlackBerry Bold 9900 as my personal device and here are a few things I have observed:

Touchscreen and Tactile Keyboard

At first this seemed like a good feature - having the best of both worlds. It turns out if you (like me) are a big fan of the BlackBerry keyboard (and this is their best yet!) you will stop using the touchscreen in favour of the trackpad and keyboard. Touchscreen has become a redundant feature in my view!

That said the Police community will probably see past the redundant touchscreen in favour of the really good keyboard.

Battery Life

Battery has been downsized (1500 mAh battery in Bold 9700 2 yrs ago and Bold 9900 has 1250 mAh battery) and I experience about 1 day's use. If I have Bluetooth and and Wifi on then less than a day! Could be due to it being a demonstration unit and there is a lot of background logging etc RIM do on these demo devices. But I am not the only person who is feeling the pain.

This alone would make it a non-starter as a Police device!

Navigation Panel

While I have to vouch for the great trackpad (lights up at night!) on the navigation panel. The navigation panel itself between touchscreen and keyboard can cause problems. Firstly it feels like it is part of the touchscreen and so feels like it should (but its not) be touch sensitive. Also single-handed use (something many BlackBerry users have always vouched for) of the touchpad can cause problems if you accidentally hit the touchscreen while trying to scroll on the trackpad.

This is something that I imagine would be an annoyance for Police with big thumbs and gloves!

Tech

Impressive and powerful processor and HD video camera/camera, which I have used extensively for filming the kids doing funny things. Which is where the 8GB on-board memory comes in handy. Still not sure what I am supposed to do with the NFC chip though!

Our police (surveillance) community would find the high res camera/video useful in the field. And because our customers are not allowed to store images on an SD card the 8GM on-board memory would be very useful.

Overall

I would start off by saying that if the battery life issues I have experienced are real then it is not a device we would suggest our Police customers consider. It is also their high end device in terms of price so that would also affect Police buying decisions.

On the other hand the device has a great look and feel and more importantly very high build quality. This together with the keyboard and technical specifications are the reason (and the waiting for the iPhone4S to be released ;-)) why I have stuck with it longer than intended.

I would go one step further and say that (battery life issues aside) it is probably the best device RIM have built. And the great keyboard really makes me nervous about moving to a touchscreen only device. That said I also feel touchscreen is a waste on a device with a tactile keyboard. it should be one or the other in terms of touchscreen and tactile keyboard. Which I guess means I now need to review the BlackBerry Torch!

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victor

Is what should be ringing in the ears of 'Sharks' players and supporters this morning after letting the 'Blue Bulls' charge down from Pretoria to Kingspark in Durban and with no time remaining on the clock, score a superb try under the posts.

By birth (my cross to bear) I am a Joburg Lions supporter but I took great pride yesterday in watching two Saffir sides play each other in the final of the Super 14 competition, in my opinion (and most antipodean's i guess ;-)) the top rugby competition in the world in terms of skill, speed and overall quality of rugby played.

The disappointment of Dick Muir (coach) and John Smit and co could be felt in the foothills of the Highveld yesterday. They clearly dominated the Bulls for 79 minutes, scored a try to stretch the lead to 6 points at the 80th minute but missed the conversion to put the game completely out of the Bulls reach with only seconds to spare on the clock.

But with enough time left for the post try kick-off to go ahead, the Bulls secured possession and managed to roll forward towards the try-line. With the Sharks tackling like madmen into the 82nd minute it looked like the cup was destined to be in the hands of the Durban faithful only for Brian Habana to weave from out on the touchline in field, swerve past 3 players and spectacularly dive through the air to score a great try underneath the uprights. What a win, what a comeback and what disappointment for the 50,000 Durban supporters.

Their disappointment however is equalised by Jake White's (current Springbok coach) and the rest of the country's excitement and optimism over the strength of South African rugby going into the International rugby season. I wonder though whether this is good or bad omen, SA teams (Cricket World Cup!!) do not like the tag of 'Favourite' although I have no doubt that even though we have had two sides in the final of the Super 14, New Zealand All Blacks must still be favourites for the World Cup in France in September this year.

I really look forward to the Tri-Nations in July and the Rugby world cup in September, lets just hope that with the punishing rugby schedule, we have all the top players playing in both competitions, as it would be a shame if injuries rob us of full strength Kiwi, Oz and Bok teams!

Off-shore Development Centre (ODC) takes away the pain

After finding out from our ODC account manager 2 weeks before our lead developer was about to get married and move to Norway at the same time we were to embark on one of the most important projects in the short life of our company thus far, meant that mild panic was about to set in.

We were assured by our ODC partner that there would be enough time to find a suitable replacement and conduct a handover but this did not calm the "squeaky bum" feeling that had descended. If this was our own in house based team whose leader was about to move on with life (granted we would have ensured more than 1 week notice) it would have meant the beginning of a very painful process of interviewing candidates, contract negotiation, skilling up etc, a process that would have taken up many man hours.

After 1 week we had our weekly conference call with the ODC team and there was news of a suitable replacement from another team; by the end of week 2 after a rather fast and frantic handover process our new team leader was up to speed and ready to take on the project work with the minimum of delay and impact to our client projects.

Because of the access to a wider resource pool of existing developers, our ODC were able to find a suitable replacement in a timeframe that would have been impossible for us to achieve in-house, this combined with decent project documentation and well commented code meant that we did not have to spend weeks or months finding and skilling a new recruit and could focus our time on managing the client business development and project delivery process with little to no interruption.

Excellent, "squeaky bum" feeling gone.....

sa vs aussies - oh dear 4 in a row

being a saffir rugby supporter i find it quite hard to watch my side lose and today we played the aussies and lost our 4th game in a row! I think most people (besides some aussies i know ;-)) would agree that while both sides were poor, in the second half south africa were the better side and possibly deserved the win more.

In the last 6 weeks we have: lost to france (after being 27-12 up) by 10 points; lost to the aussies (massive hiding 49-0) by 49 points; lost to the kiwis (after being 17-17) by 12 points; and lost to the aussies again (after being 5 points up with 2 mins to go) but only by 2 points.

before this game there was much talk of jake white and the springboks having lost the plot, which I cannot argue with, however there are other forces at play. We have lost 4 key players to injury and this combined with selection quotas means we do not have the best squad to choose from. No where was this more evident than the 1st 2 tests against the aussies & the kiwis.

Be that as it may the springboks under jake white have performed better than many previous saffir coaches since our inclusion back into the international game 15 years ago. In the past 3 years since our disastrous Camp Stalingrad and World Cup campaign, we have won 1 tri-nations, narrowly lost the last tri-nations to the kiwis and while we appear to be completely out of it this year, I saw enough good work today and in the second half of the kiwi game 2 weeks ago to suggest that we could still get a few good results back in the next 3 home games.

Sometimes the saffir public are too quick to point fingers and lay blame when we get a few bad results in a row, lets show some support for a change and give the coach and the team some breathing room to deliver the goods in the last 3 tri-nations games and finish the year as contenders for the world cup next year.

If they do fall short of the mark in these next 3 games and the end of year games, then perhaps something needs to change, but getting rid of a coach less than a year before a world cup is a big risk!

I think there are other options....

software developers adding value through the project lifecycle

When software developers work within an environment that encourages them to question/validate requirements, be involved in the creation of the specification as well as the actual development of the software, I believe it has a really positive impact on the end product.

This may seem to some people like standard practise, however I find when managing off-shore teams it is a discipline that can be easily lost. it is allot more difficult and tempting to do all of the requirements gathering and specification on-shore and then push a document across, have a quick chat about it and let the dev team get on with it.

Sometimes one can get carried away with the making sure you are getting maximum value out of the development team by making them spend most of the time coding, rather than reading/writing documents, participating in discussions and so on.

Freeing up the development team to spend the time needed to engage early on with the project allows them to: understand the wider goal; become more involved through the lifecycle; have more sense of ownership for the end result; and ultimately develop better solutions.

This is Bru's first test post

Yes the infamous test post, if i had some more time I would write something insightful, useful and funny, but I don't so here we go.