rodcorp

Blackberry, kind of like iPod

We have been using a Blackberry 7730 for a multi-location data services project recently. More on that project in due course; some thoughts on the device in the meantime.

What's good:

• The UI will be familiar to anyone who's used a scroller wheel/button, and there's a useful Cancel button just beneath it. The UI is fast and very intuitive (much more so than Nokia's Series 60 - the larger keyboard obviously helps, but the whole experience does feel fundamentally better designed) - perhaps this is why corporate users often feel as strongly about their Blackberrys as consumers do about their iPods? And note that these devices first enter corporates as toys for the execs, but rapidly become essential to these users ("out of my cold, dead hands..."), who will later be more likely to support projects that propose to use them for communications/IT/support/logistics/reporting/whatever solutions.
• It stacks all of your in- and out-bound voice, text and email messages in one date-separated list which is quite neat
• Email to/from the device is pretty good - it often retrieves mail faster than your desktop client. It saves emails (or data, generally) for sending later if you don't have a connection, but timestamps them as if they'd been sent when you wanted. This smart asynchronicity makes the device really useful for projects that both require data collection in the field and have a risk that the point of collection may not have great coverage.
• The email-and-voice means that you have a reason to have one master address book at last.
• The 240x240/65k-colour screen is extremely good, and protected behind tough glass(?)
• Other: the small magnet that switches of the screen if you put it in its holster: this helps give it huge battery life. You can switch off the radio to use it on the plane. The 7730 is tri-band, 7750 is dual-band.

What's bad:

• Phone is only good enough: your ear needs to be positioned just so, otherwise you can't hear it. Similarly, the keyboard is slightly too small for these fingers. And some users will ask where the stylus is (there isn't one: you type).
• It needs an Exchange or Notes server (yuck) to make the email bit work, which tends to limit it to corporate users. Support for IMAP coming next year perhaps.
• The battery life is so long that you'll forget to charge it.
• Suspect the platform is pretty closed compared to other mobile platforms. And it's definitely quite hard to develop for.

You need: a standard GPRS package to make it work.

Update: the Blackberry name considered accessible and friendly, compact and efficient, and fun in this article on sound symbolism and branding:

Semantically, for instance, the name "BlackBerry" suggests accessibility; "berry" also connotes smallness compared with other hand-helds. But phonologically, according to Lexicon's research, respondents rate the b sound as most strongly suggesting relaxation. In other words, the two b's say that using this hand-held won't require a 200-page manual. The short vowels in the first two syllables lend crispness: pushing a few buttons will quickly accomplish your goal. The alliteration conveys light-heartedness, much as Kit Kat does. The final y, says Dr. Whissell, who has no connection to any naming company, "is very pleasant and friendly, which is why you often find it in nicknames."

Smithson's Spiral Jetty: restoration or slow destruction?

Martin Gayford, in the Telegraph: Should Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty be restored, or simply left to the forces of nature?

Three decades of immersion have coated the dark rock with sparkling salt crystals, so the Jetty and its surroundings now resemble a landscape from the frozen north. The rich, rusty waters coloured by moulting shrimp and algae have now turned pale pink. All of this poses a neat conservation dilemma for the Dia Centre for the Arts, to which the Spiral Jetty was donated in 1999.

[... H]e sometimes said he wanted his works to last. But his ruling obsession was with slow destruction and decay – in that respect, like Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, Smithson was a great American pessimist (almost as marked a feature of the national psyche as can-do optimism).

Smithson loved the idea of entropy – the Newtonian notion that all systems degenerate into disorder – and applied it to everything from ecology to the Nixon administration. So the fact that his greatest sculpture is itself subject to constant environmental change might well have struck him as exquisitely apt.

See also: Robert Smithson (including lovely map drawings and Jetty film), and Spiral Jetty.

Duchampian varia

Commutter: Someone told us that Duchamp was in the habit of suiting up in the morning, leaving home with a briefcase, and walking round the block as if he were just one more commuter on his way to work. (This is probably apocryphal, but let us know.)

Interesting: Andrew "Hey" Otwell's socio-art-historic review of View Magazine's Marcel Duchamp Special Issue, March 1945 and Francis Naumann's Enough Is Enough Is Enough.

Jessica Jernigan and Bill Murray discuss Duchamp and Elvis. Murray: "Well, there's something about him that's… there is a certain integrity when you can destroy about what you do—you know, when you're able to laugh at yourself. Even in life, people who can laugh at themselves are the only ones I can really bear." Also: Joyce and Jarry on destroying [and] their work and MD, 1961: "I don't want to destroy art for anybody else but for myself, that's all."

Rrestling: Meanwhile, Pollock plays and wins* against Duchamp, whose defence looked a little indifferent, if we're honest.
(*: Duchamp on chess.)

Nothing Lasts Forever: nothingness in art (cf the Mallarmean blank) and a delicately balanced grand piano (cf Duchampian inframince).

An implied (and readymade) lineage: "Yet, from Duchamp to McLaren, from ? and the Mysterians to Simple Machines, from FactSheet 5 to weblog, it has continually been proven: Technique is overrated. Ideas are still important." More on lineages to come.

Ian Hays on Joyce and Duchamp

Ian Hays, a friend and former tutor at Coventry University, is starting a website about his art and research on James Joyce and Marcel Duchamp. We're proud to host it, and will guest-write there occasionally.

Duchamp has agreed to design the cover of Transition no.26: using the same image of the silvered metal comb standing almost vertically on a mat, grey-green ground, the title of the review laid next to it, in the same perspective, is printed in gold.
James Joyce's reaction when he sees Duchamp's cover is to tell Sylvia Beach that the comb is the one he will use to "comb out" his Work in Progress, some pages of which are published in the same number of Transition. Other contributors to this issue include Raymond Queneau, Man Ray, and Alexander Calder. [15 Dec 1936, in Ephemerides on or about Marcel Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy]

Work in Progress becomes Finnegans Wake (1922-39). The comb is MD's readymade of 1916, and on its spine are the words "3 ou 4 gouttes de hauteur n'ont rien a faire avec la sauvagerie" (3 or 4 drops of height have nothing to do with savagery).