In a nutshell, Dropbox smartly and automatically synchronizes a hierarchy of folders among any number of Windows PCs, Macs, Linux PCs and iPhones.  All of the synchronized changes are automatically backed up on Dropbox’s servers, and you can go back into the past to retrieve previous versions or deleted files.

Here’s how it works:

1. Sign up for a Dropbox account, which comes with 2GB of storage for free (you can pay small monthly fees for more storage).
2. Install and configure (i.e., enter your email address and password) the Dropbox client on two or more computers or iPhones.
3. The client creates a Dropbox folder whose contents you can manipulate like any other folder on your computer.
4. Any changes you make to the folder on any of the clients are automatically propagated to all of the other computers linked to your account.
5. The clients are bandwidth-sensitive (e.g., you can install Dropbox on your laptop and it won’t take up all of your 3G bandwidth when you’re tethered to your phone) and supposedly even know how to synchronize between clients on the same LAN.
6. The files you put into Dropbox are also accessible through their Web site, and you can share links to specific Dropbox folders to friends or colleagues.

As noted above, you can get 2GB of storage for free.  Furthermore, you can easily get a 250MB bonus just by spending a few minutes using the service (for details, click on “Getting Started” from the Web site home page after logging in).  You can also get a 250MB bonus by signing up through another user’s referral link (in case you haven’t noticed, all of the links to the service I’ve posted in this blog posting are referral links for my account ) and additional bonuses for referring other people.

There are other services like this one, e.g., SugarSync, but this is the best one I’ve seen, and the fact that it has Linux support is totally sweet.  My only complaint is that it doesn’t (yet) have a BlackBerry client.

Alas, it’s still wrong in the MBTA’s own Trip Planner.

Go figure.

I found two to consider: LogicMail, which is free, and Tiggit Mail, which costs $30.  Both are under active development.  I evaluated them and found them both to be inadequate.

I sent feedback to the authors of both applications describing the bugs I’d encountered and the missing functionality which I felt was essential.  The Tiggit issue list was significantly longer than the LogicMail list, ~20 items vs. ~5, and I really didn’t expect a fast or substantive response from the author.

To my surprise, he responded the same day: “Thank you for this very useful list of issues… I am happy to extend your trial period until such time as the defects are resolved… It is very helpful to get honest feedback like this, and if there are any other thoughts you have, please don’t hesitate to email.”

With this, he and I started a discussion which has continued for over a month.  Our exchanges spanned several beta releases of the application, each of which addressed more of the issues I’d reported.

Yesterday, I installed the most recent beta and found to my delight that all of the issues that I considered showstoppers were fixed.  This didn’t stop me from sending the author a laundry list of previously reported issues that still weren’t fixed and several new issues as well , but since all the major ones were fixed, I went ahead and purchased a license, as I’d promised the author I would do as soon as I felt the application was useable.

A few hours later, Paypal notified me that my license fee had been refunded.  I wrote to the author and asked him what was up, and he responded, “I could not take the money after all the constructive feedabck you have given.  The license is of course yours, free of charge as a token of my appreciation.  I hope tiggit will serve you well, and you will continue to provide helpful comments.”

With his prompt, courteous, and effective response to my feedback, the author of Tiggit Mail transofmred my initial, negative experience into a positive one.  He took my feedback seriously, recognized and acknowledged the validity of my concerns, and addressed them quickly.  He made it clear that he values his customers and understands that the point of what he’s doing is to make them happy.  Finally, refunding my license fee was a perfect example of what Jeffrey Gitomer talks about in Customer Satisfaction is Worthless, Customer Loyalty is Priceless: when trying to turn around a dissatisfied customer, always give the customer more than he expects.

I heartily recommend Tiggit Mail to anyone who is looking for an IMAP client for the BlackBerry.  It’s well worth the $30 license fee, even if you don’t receive a refund.

I just got this email from Microsoft (click for a larger image):

And here’s what I got when I tried to visit the My Phone Web site.  You can click through to see the full-size image, but I’ll tell you what it says and save you the trouble: “The Microsoft® My Phone service is temporarily unavailable due to system maintenance.  Please try again later.  We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The astute nerd will note that when the traffic delay time shown above is converted into seconds, it comes out to 4,294,967,220, and when you cast the 32-bit signed integer value -1 to a 32-bit unsigned integer, it comes out to 4,294,967,295.  The conclusion is left as an exercise to the reader.

But when push came to shove and I needed to buy a new phone (because I dropped the old one for the nth time and the LCD broke), I looked at all the options and decided, despite my misgivings, that I was going to have to go with the Tilt, AT&T’s Windows Mobile 6.1 replacement for the 8525.  Here’s why:

• As cool as it is, the iPhone is ruled out because tethering my laptop to the network through my phone is a non-negotiable feature, one that the iPhone doesn’t offer (well, it does if you jailbreak it, but I’m not willing to jailbreak a phone paid for by my employer and make myself dependent on features that the vendor doesn’t support).
• PalmOS and Blackberry are both ruled out because none of the AT&T PalmOS or Blackberry OS phones support 3G.  Given how heavily I use the network through my phone, EDGE-only is simply not an option.  There are other reasons, too, but this is the biggest one.

(I’d love to go with the Google Phone, but it’s not available yet from AT&T and I don’t know if an unlocked T-Mobile Google Phone would be fully functional on the AT&T network.  Even if it would be, I’m sure it would take me a buttload of time to make it work, and that’s time I don’t have.  Really, I just want to be able to buy a PDA Phone from AT&T that does what I need out of the box and doesn’t suck.  Is that too much to ask?  Apparently, yes, it is.)

And so, although my gut was telling me that I was not going to be happy, I went ahead and ordered the Tilt.  “How bad could it be?” I thought to myself.  “Surely in Windows Mobile 6.1 they will have addressed the stability problems in Windows Mobile 6.0, right?”  Yeah, right, pull the other one.

I’ve had the Tilt for less than two weeks.  Not only is its stability no better than the 8525′s, it’s actually markedly worse.  In fact, it’s so bad that shortly after I got it, I started keeping a log of all the things that go wrong with it.  Here is the list of the bugs I’ve encountered so far.  These are not subjective, vague complaints about the interface of the phone, they are real, honest-to-goodness, nobody-can-argue-with-them bugs.  They are severe functional defects in major functionality that people use every day.  Most of them are issues that I have encountered multiple times and continue to encounter on an ongoing basis.

1. Messaging (IMAP) redisplays messages that have already been read and deleted by the user.
2. Internet Explorer stops being able to resolve DNS host names (unfixed from WM 6.0).
3. The phone forgets to display reminders for upcoming appointments.
4. The “Today” screen goes blank and doesn’t come back until you power-cycle the phone (unfixed from WM 6.0).
5. When I tried to change the notification preferences for new email messages and save the new settings, the phone claimed that the settings was invalid because of a corrupt ring tone, even though the ring tone was not in fact corrupt and I didn’t change it anyway (this is probably a race-condition bug; I’ve only seen it once).
6. The power button regularly “double bounces” when I use it to turn on the phone screen, i.e., the screen comes on and then immediately turns off, and I have to hit the button a second time to turn it back on.
7. Icons suddenly disappear from the “Settings” screen, and the only way to get them back is to power-cycle the phone (unfixed from WM 6.0).
8. When you are in the messaging application and you turn off the screen in the middle of a Send/Receive, the Send/Receive fails (unfixed from WM 6.0).
9. I configure the backlight to dim when I’ve been idle for 1 minute, but it keeps switching itself back from the 1 minute setting I configured to 10 seconds.
10. Every once in a while the phone spontaneously reboots.
11. Once, the messaging application was suddenly unable to send outbound SMTP messages. To fix it, I viewed the server settings for the account, paging through them without actually changing any of them, and after doing that SMTP started working again.
12. I’ve seen multiple crashes from the tmail.exe and shell.exe applications.
13. I’ve seen at least one fatal exception from the PocketPC2003.exe application.
14. The LED on the phone is supposed to blink yellow when there are new email messages, but it regularly fails to do so (unfixed from WM 6.0).
15. The phone occasionally turns off WiFi or BlueTooth spontaneously for no obvious reason.
16. Every once in a while the phone stops displaying the network status when you tap the bars icon in the title bar.
17. [Added 11/5/2008] Pocket Internet Explorer suddenly stopped being able to display protected pages on my WordPress blog, even though this worked just fine (until it stopped working) and nothing has changed on the blog end of things.  I tried everything I could think of or find on the Web to fix this, short of wiping the phone, and eventually gave up and installed Opera Mobile.

Good grief!

What can I do?  Is there, somewhere on the market, a phone I can buy that will work with the AT&T 3G network (my employer’s preferred vendor); supports these features out of the box, or at least with a minimal amount of tweaking; and doesn’t suck?

• Phone (obviously!)
• Laptop tethering via BlueTooth PAN and USB
• WiFi
• 3G with fallback to EDGE when 3G not available
• IMAP email (send, receive, display HTML, view IMAP folders and move messages between them)
• Outlook email (send, receive, display HTML, view folders and move messages between them, Calendar and Contacts synchronization)
• Decent HTML browser
• Useable keyboard
• Touch screen a plus but not a requirement
• 320×240 or larger screen
• Notes application
• Camera (still a must, video a plus but not a requirement)
• Google Maps or equivalent with GPS support (built-in or external BlueTooth)
• Support for reading Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents a plus but not a requirement
• Text file editor
• SSH client a plus but not a requirement
• Remote Desktop client a plus but not a requirement

I recently ordered from ExtremePDA.com a new Krusell case for my HTC Hermes PDA Phone, after the old case I bought from Cingular (which they apparently no longer sell, at least not on-line, but which closely resembled this one) with the phone wore out.

When the new case arrived, I found that when I used the spring clip included with the case, it fell off my belt several times per day. The old case pretty much never fell off, so this was definitely a step in the wrong direction. After it fell off and I didn’t notice it was gone for an hour (fortunately this happened when I was at home rather than in transit), I decided I really needed to do something about it, so I emailed ExtremePDA and asked which Krusell clip I could buy (Krusell cases have interchangeable clips) that wouldn’t allow the case to fall off like the spring clip.

ExtremePDA responded quickly and told me not to bother buying another clip — they’d send me the right one for free. True to their word, a few days later I received a package from them with two clips in it. I’ve been using one of them since then, and the case hasn’t fallen off my belt once.

ExtremePDA was prompt and responsive and solved my problem without nickel-and-diming me. They clearly understand what customer service is all about. For that, I will surely give them more business in the future should the opportunity arise, and I encourage you to do the same!

To add insult to injury, when I turned on the backlight of the phone four hours later and looked at the time in the corner of the screen, it was still an hour off… I had to reset the phone to correct it.

The most common recommendation I found on the Web and in the microsoft.public.pocketpc newsgroup for getting rid of the ghost alarms was to perform a hard reset on the device, i.e., to clear all memory and restore the device to its factory default settings. This is unacceptable to me since it takes a significant amount of time for me to reinstall all my applications and restore all of my configuration settings each time I have to do this, so I keep searching for other solutions.

I finally discovered that Windows Mobile has a “notifications queue” independent of individual applications that generate notifications, and that sometimes periodic notifications get stuck in this queue even when they have been “disowned” by the applications that originally generated them

I found two tools that can fix this problem. One of them, MemMaid, can be configured to run automatically on a daily basis to clean up problems with the notifications queue, and is therefore probably the right tool to use if this problem recurs for you on a regular basis. The other tool, SKTools, comes with a whole bunch of other tools for cleaning up, optimizing and tweaking the behavior of Windows Mobile, so it’s probably a better bargain if you don’t need to clean your notifications queue automatically on a regular basis.

I must say that I think it’s unfortunate that people have to pay money for tools to fix problems caused by bugs in Microsoft code. Microsoft should provide tools to do this for free, or they should fix the darn bugs.

While digging through the registry on the phone in an effort to fix a different issue, a discovered how to turn off the animation and sound, so I thought I’d share this information in case it might be useful to other people.

Using a Windows Mobile registry editor such as Mobile Registry Editor (free; google for it), Resco Explorer (commercial), or SKTools (commercial), find the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\HTC\StartupAnimation and change the value Enabled from 1 to 0.

There is a value Volumn in the same registry key which I thought might be useful for changing the volume of the sound, but I tried various settings for it with no effect.