GeekLawyer’s Blog

For an eternity Geeklawyer has been trying to get his superflash phone to act as a modem for his Apple laptop, and failing in truly monumental style. In a moment of rare and uncharacteristic self-doubt he wondered if perhaps he was not, after all, both an alpha male lawyer and an alpha geek.

Nothing that he did, no amount of hacking scripts - whatever, could persuade his MDA Pro to act as a modem. The bluetooth connection worked fine but Windows Mobile 5 just couldn’t persuade itself to talk in any comprehensible way to a non-Winows laptop; and the Powerbook for its part, while well able to talk to myriad Nokias Sony-Ericcsons & assorted other phones, was unable to talk to an extremely common phone operating system.

In the end Geeklawyer surrendered: acting on the similar experiences of a Powerbook using geek friend working at Google he bought an, old as hell, Nokia 6230. The Powerbook instantly greeted it like an old friend, and after some minor configuration issues it began talking to the World on the Powerbook’s behalf.

The moral? first and foremost: avoid Microsoft Windows in any form if at all possible. Geeklawyer tries not to be an irrational OS bigot, but really, how such a big company, a monopolist, can get so many things so badly wrong nearly all the time just defies belief. And the second moral: let us not let Microsoft’s flaws persuade us to let Apple of the hook entirely: Microsoft Windows Mobile 5 is a major phone OS; not to have the usual flawless, no-brainer, just works, Mac OSx third party device support is inexcusable and most un-Apple-like, indeed it’s what Geeklawyer would expect from Microsoft. He worries that as Apple grows large it may grow fat incompetent & lazy, like them.

For now however Geeklawyer revels in the ability to use a large laptop screen instead of a weeny teeny phone one. And to never be away from his one true love: no not Ruthie, who he hates, but you, beloved reader. Huzzah!!!