Touched a Nerve

My rant against the Treo 650 (a device I am connected to the hip with) definitely touched a nerve. It was one of my best read posts and in addition to the blistering 3 comments posted, I actually received a bunch of email.

Many of the emails I received fell into 5 categories:

1. Treo sucks.
2. Blackberry sucks.
3. Random other device rules.
4. Gimme the e70!
5. Enlarge your penis.

I don't think #5 was directly related to my post, but I wasn't sure.

A few people had some great points:

1. The problem with all these devices is they turn us into email addicts; we check them first thing in the morning, last thing at night, out on a date, etc.
2. The voice/phone features on both the treo and blackberry lag a dedicated phone only device, such as the Motorola RAZR v3.
3. Is anyone really editing excel or word document on their phone?

One real benefit of these phones has nothing to do with email. Their larger screens allow a better web browsing experience. Many phones have built in web browsers that allow you to surf normal websites easily on a small screen. If you goto wap.google.com on your cell phone, google will convert any website you select after a search into a mobile friendly version.

This means your favorite websites can be taken anywhere, whether or not the site has a special web version. My favorites to check while in a wine shop:

1. www.erobertparker.com: for ratings and tasting notes
   
2. www.winezap.com: for comparitive prices of wines from US retailers (offered by my company)
3. vinography.com: what's hot now.

Try it yourself - check your phone's menu for a web browser icon.

Next week I will back on wine tech - specifically, could some open source projects help online wine applications?