NuviPhone shown for real?

It has been a while since we last heard about Garmin's NuviPhone - which is now a joint partnership between Garmin and Asus, it was still a prototype at best. And the few that had seen the light of day were buggy and hardly usable. But now, a working NuviPhone has been seen in Barcelona, and people were mostly impressed with it.

The phone has come a very long way since we last saw it, with a snappy, smooth interface, and nary a glitch or crash. The touchscreen keyboard -- usable in portrait and landscape modes -- is no pretender to the iPhone's throne, but is one of the best we've seen on a resistive touch device. We also found the WebKit-based browser to be one of the smoother ones we've seen outside the T-Mobile G1 and the iPhone.

I doubt this phone will gain a significant marketshare in light of the Apple iPhone, Google Android, and Palm Pre. But it is never a bad thing to have a good competitor in the market to keep the big guys honest. And I do love my Garmin Nuvi GPS.

Blackberry E-mail Service is Down

Apparently, the popular BlackBerry devices from RIM are 100% dead in the second major outage in a year. With many people in business, politics, and government reliant on these devices for day-to-day operations, it may encourage more people to jump ship to Apple's iPhone, Danger's Sidekick, or Microsoft's Windows Mobile devices.

UPDATE 2:42 PM: I an reading that the outage has been resolved.

Smartphone for Sean

With all the talk of the iPhone the past few days months, I've started to look more seriously into getting a smart phone. As I've stated before, the iPhone is completely off the table. I'm looking for something that:

1. Won't cost me an arm & a leg to buy.
2. Has a good data plan & cell plan (or a combo that is fairly competitive)
3. Will allow me a lot of functionality on the web

With those condition stated, I'm wondering what the Mod-Blog community thinks is the best option - Blackberry, Sidekick, Treo or something else that I haven't even looked at? Discuss...

iPhone service plans announced

For those interested - which seems to be about 60% of Mod-Bloggers - the service plans for the iPhone have been announced. Apple/AT&T have made a smart move in making data rates unlimited on all plans. The rates seem competitive with something like a Sidekick which, from what I can tell is $30 for data and whatever calling plan you want. (Please correct me if I'm wrong, those of you with a Sidekick). So, the bottom plan for the iPhone is $60 with data and calling. Not too bad, though that does mean you have to fork over the $500 for the phone in the first place.

Some thoughts on the iPhone SDK

My new favorite blog has posted some thoughts on the iPhone SDK. As you may have heard, Apple isn't releasing a software development kit - instead they're pushing developers to create programs meant to run on Safari. Basically what this means is that programs for the iPhone won't actually reside on the iPhone. Instead they will be essentially web pages. So, this blogger wonders if you are willing to a) trust websites to store your private data and b) pay for the data plan that you'll need to update that data.

Since I'm not planning on getting a iPhone - hopefully a Blackberry - these things aren't real concerns for me. But for those that are thinking about it, this is something worth thinking about. It seems that perhaps Apple has finally found a way to push people to the web to make it the hard drive of the future that people have been proclaiming it to be - for some time.

Thoughts?