Daily Archives:June 5th, 2005

BluePhoneElite

My Motorola RAZR V3

I love my new Motorola RAZR V3. It’s the first phone I’ve really been able to slip in my jeans pocket and not notice. It doesn’t spoil the outline of my otherwise svelte figure(!) and it also has noticeably better sound quality than any mobile I’ve used recently.

Of course, when moving away from Nokia, you sacrifice ease of use, and Motorola’s user interface is even worse than most. This has bothered me less in recent years because much of what I used to do on phone keypads I now do on my Powerbook, which integrates with most of them very nicely. Sadly, however, the RAZR doesn’t integrate with the Mac Address Book as well as my previous phones. In particular, unlike the Nokia, it doesn’t let me send SMS messages directly from the Address Book.

This is why I was particularly pleased to discover BluePhoneElite, a $20 utility which not only gives you lots of control over SMSes, incoming and outgoing calls etc, but also does some cute things with Bluetooth, like pausing your music and changing your IM status when you (& your phone) go out of range of the computer. It also does genuinely useful things like pausing iTunes when you make or receive a call.

Very nice. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. Look at the stars!

More from Paul Graham

I wrote yesterday about Paul Graham’s talk on ‘Great Hackers’. There’s an essay based on the talk on Paul’s site.

But one phrase in particular caught my attention, to the extent that I’m going to add it to my Favourite Quotes page. I’m not sure if it’s his originally, but it’s rather good:

“I’d always supposed … that curiosity was simply the first derivative of knowledge.”

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser