The developers have created a clever means of using special syntax placed into the subject line of the email that will categorize an email for you automatically. For example, if I sent an email to my special Toodledo inbox, and created a subject line with “Pickup Dry Cleaning #Next thursday,” Toodledo would create a task for picking up the dry cleaning, along with next Thursday as the due date.

Email Subject Line Syntax≠Good Usability
I keep a cheat sheet on my desktop with the special syntax (I have a Tomboy note for this), but I find it cumbersome to work this way in practice. Usability wise, it’s very easy to screw this up, and try as I might I often screw up the syntax. You have to think about it too much for my tastes.

Also, I often want to get the email into my “waiting” status (so I know to check on the receipients progress), and I hate the idea of the various TD syntax being exposed to the recipient of an email I’ve sent them.

Send Your Email to Toodledo, but Use Toodledo to Process
Using Toodledo, I’ve arrived at a system that works well for me now. It allows me to quickly track emails that need to be converted to tasks, and gives me the power/flexibility of Toodledo’s interface to process them. Here’s how I do it:

1. I have a Gmail contact for my TD email address (the name field in the contact is TD), so I can just type “TD” in the “To:” field in Gmail.
2. When I want to get an email into TD I either forward the email, or if I’m replying to someone, I BCC it to the TD address.
3. In TD my default folder is something I’ve labeled “Inbox.” Any emails I forward from Gmail end up there to be processed GTD style. Then it’s really easy to quickly assign status, folder, context, due dates, etc…
4. To make the “watched” inbox/gmail thing work for me, I run 4 tiled browsers (Chrome works well for this), each open to a different view on a secondary desktop, with the inbox in the lower right. I’ve set this up on a separate computer/monitor that I control via my main keyboard using an app called Synergy. This way my task dashboard is always in my face (and my task inbox is always visible). BTW, I use a really inexpensive Netop computer for this and an older/smaller LCD screen that I had lying around.
5. I also utilize the Ultimate To-Do-List on my Android-based phone and keep my Inbox on a secondary home screen. I often end up doing mobile gmail to task conversion by forwarding mails from my Droid to Toodledo.

You can see this in action here (Inbox is in lower right):

Click on the image for a larger view

I consider this to be a work in progress. The second machine/synergy thing has really helped me, as has the Toodledo inbox folder as a means of processing.

There are several interesting Gmail/GTD tools out there that have caught my attention. GQueus and ActiveInbox look like they would be great GTD/task tools for Gmail users such as myself; however, to effectively evaluate them, I would have to reengineer my setup, which will require more time than I’m ready to spend right now (not ready to take the deep dive). Great as Toodledo is, the lack of a more direct Gmail/Google Calendar integration does have me keeping my eyes on other apps.

Daughter rather liked the Kindle, but immediately ran into the issue of how to feed books into it on her limited budget (her iPod offers similar challenges). Dad on the other hand has a little bit more liberties disposable income wise, so I decided to borrow the device a few weeks ago, and am now nearly through my 2nd full length book (Daughter now wants the Kindle back). And while I don’t love it, I’m not ready to give it back yet. I’m curious as to what other’s experience has been.

The Kindle is Very Imperfect
I find the Kindle very imperfect, but will admit I’m hooked on having a small electronic slate next to bedside that quickly wakes to the page I left off on the night before. And while I love libraries and book stores, it’s amazingly convenient to hear about a book on the radio, or from a friend, and to get it delivered immediately.

I have a gooseneck LED reading lamp at bedside, which is almost required Kindle equipment, especially if one’s partner is trying to sleep when you are reading. The E Ink technology that allows the Kindle to run for weeks on end without a charge is not quite bright enough to read without another light source. From a reading in bed perspective, the oddest thing about the Kindle reading experience is turning pages. The 2nd generation Kindle relies on a dedicated page turning button which audibly clicks when you press it (apparently the newest 3rd generation Kindle has made this a quieter operation). If you haven’t done the Kindle thing, imagine a silent bedroom with your partner sleeping gently beside you… then click. The page turns sound positively cacophonous.

Since a Kindle book is readable on other devices, self conscious about waking my spouse, I tried reading one night on my Nexus One Android phone. Page turning is a simple silent finger swipe move, and of course the device’s AMOLED screen is very bright (no reading light required). Still there was something inherently awkward about hanging out under the covers with my smartphone in hand (and the brightness was definitely part of it). The handset is dense, where the Kindle is more balanced and thinner (more book like). We have a book jacket type cover for the Kindle, but the last couple of nights I’ve take the cover off as it adds unnecessary weight and the back flap is cumbersome while reading.

With the rise of Apple’s iPad, and various emerging competing tablet/slate solutions there is a great deal of debate regarding the relevance of a purpose built reading device like the Kindle. The pundits are suggesting that this holiday season will mark a real shift into eBook land similar to what we saw with digital music and photography. The question of course will be what will you be using to read those eBooks? One potential interesting challenger is Barnes & Noble, whose recent introduction of of the Nook Color (review here) delivers something in between an iPad and a Kindle, but still decidedly a reading device first. As far as form factor/device, I’m still on the fence. The Nook Color will undoubtedly evolve (or die) quickly, so conventional wisdom is to stay away from this first generation device.

Are you reading in bed with your iPad or Kindle? Do you love it? or are you a Luddite and sticking with paper for now?

P.S. I highly recommend my first 2 eBooks: Jane Levy’s The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood and Mark Greenside’s I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do).

Last month, after running my ThinkPad X61 as a dual-boot Windows/Linux (Ubuntu) laptop for 14 months, I finally wiped Windows off of my hard drive and opened up 160 GB of space. I had kept the Windows XP boot option there as a safety since the beginning, but after not using it for several months I decided I no longer needed the crutch.

I’m by no means a revolutionary as many others have done this, but as with my move to Google Apps (detailed here), the shift is very telling, especially for the small business community (which I’m a member of). In the new world, especially where much of one’s transactional life happens in a web browser, one fundamentally doesn’t need Microsoft Windows anymore. That’s a big deal, especially in a time where a recent decision to put Windows 7 Ultimate Edition (64 bit) on one of our laptops cost my business $258.99. Obviously there’s more to this than money, including the ability to run on a wide variety of hardware (including old seemingly out of date computers) and stability (e.g. no blue screens, viruses or spyware).

A Little Detail and Some Back Story
I started the Linux thing purely as an experiment. The whole idea that there was a very large community of people collaborating on excellent free software was always very intriguing to me. I was also attracted to the idea of technology that could easily run on low-end hardware and was free of licensing restrictions. In 2004 or so I took an old desktop PC and installed whatever the “easy to use” flavor of the Linux-day. In spite of my comfort with PCs, I was immediately confused and disoriented. I quickly gave up.

Last year, after doing lots of homework I went at this very step wise and methodically. One of the engineers who worked for me talked up Ubuntu and I felt compelled to try again. I first built a home server for storing my music and our family’s backup files. Nothing special. I bought some very cheap hardware off of NewEgg.com, salvaged an old hard drive, and installed the operating system on a cheap compact flash card (same kind as you’d use in a camera).

This first go round was not in the least bit difficult, but it was still strictly hobbiest stuff. Still I was successful enough at the process that I decided to go after my day-to-day computer.

Linux had evolved significantly by my second go round, so by the time I built my home-brew server I was able to install it easily, and the system was immediately familiar and usable to me. Today that home-brew server not only streams my music collection throughout the house, it is also a backup device for my wife (Windows 7) and my daughter (XP), and acts as a print server for our household color printer. Not bad for a very low powered system that cost less than $200.

Not Ready for the Deep Dive
When it came time to my day-to-day computer, I wasn’t ready for the deep dive immediately, so started my transition by installing an Ubuntu variant called Wubi. Wubi lives completely inside of your Windows install, and doesn’t require uninstalling anything or making a commitment—a perfect try before you buy scenario. You keep Windows as is, but have a choice at boot time whether to launch Ubuntu or Windows. It doesn’t allow you run both at the same time like other virtualization schemes (more about that later), but it’s a remarkable piece of practical engineering that allows you to play around like it’s the real thing. Don’t like it? Very easy to uninstall it without a trace.

After about a month I was ready to make a bigger move and installed Ubuntu side by side with Windows XP (I’d abandoned Vista a few months before because of very serious bugs I was running into, and Windows 7 was not yet available). The stock Ubuntu installer does a nice job of separating church and state and soon enough I was able to choose whether I wanted Windows or Ubuntu upon boot. I  created an NTFS  partition (standard Windows file format) that could share my working data between the operating systems (documents, images, music, etc…), and soon I was living in Ubuntu most of the time.

I admit it, I use Crossover and VirtualBox, but I’ve found lots of good non-Windows software I like
Let me admit a few things. As much as I’ve tried to embrace the open source OpenOffice for day-to-day word processing and business chores, I don’t love it and still use Microsoft’s Office 2007 (which understandably doesn’t have a Linux version). I bit the bullet a few months back and purchased Codeweaver’s Crossover, an application layer that allows you to run regular Windows programs in Linux (also on Apple computers). While it is possible to run Microsoft Office in Linux without Crossover using the free Wine, Crossover takes away a lot of the headache of doing this. I do find myself running Microsoft Office less and less and using the OS agnostic Google Docs instead, but Google’s office apps are still incomplete so it’s nice to have standard Word and Excel available when needed.

My business does customer support work that requires us logging into customer sites using a variety of VPN protocols, not all of which play well together on the same computer. Also, many of the applications we support are Windows-based, so having a Windows-capable environment is necessary for me a few times a week. To handle Windows when I need it, I’ve turned to Oracle’s free VirtualBox which runs nicely inside of Ubuntu and gives me Windows on demand.

XP (or whatever Windows is your preference) runs really nicely inside of VirtualBox and can run any Windows application natively. I end up using VirtualBox for GoToMeeting and a handful of odd ball scenarios where I need Windows (like websites that only run on Internet Explorer).

What About those Trusted Applications?
Like most computer users I’ve come to rely on some trusted niche applications that I needed to find equivalents of in Ubuntu/Linux land. More than a year into this process, I can tell you that a die-hard Windows guy like I used to be can get along just fine with a little bit of fishing around. There are some amazing folks out there writing open source applications and you’d be surprised at how evolved some of the offerings are.

Here’s a short list of some of the applications I use on a day-to-day basis:

Should I Jump?
As much as I would like to say so, Ubuntu (or Linux) is not for everyone. It it a really viable option for a lot of people? I think so.

Unless you are extremely motivated to learn yourself, I think a key in making the jump is having someone who you can call on for support. I mostly didn’t have someone, but I was interested in learning and used online resources. For the motivated, there are several great blogs and forums that can help and  the Absolute Beginner area at Ubuntu Forums is incredible place to start. I also have learned a lot from the following blogs: OMG! Ubuntu, WorksWithU, Tombuntu, and UbuntuGeek. You’d be amazed at the generosity of the community, especially towards newbies.

Oddly enough, I think one real stumbling point for consumer adoption is the iPod or iPhone. Since I’m not an iTouch, iPhone, or iPod user, this was not an issue for me, but for many of the folks I know, this would be an issue.

A couple of months back I chronicled my 12-year old daughter’s Windows malware meltdown. For a few days while I worked through getting her computer usable again, daughter used my Netbook, configured with Linux Mint (a variant of Ubuntu). She actually rather liked it and was quite open to giving up on Windows. What held me back, was that she is a regular iPod user, who uses iTunes to purchase and manage her music collection. While there are ways to get iTunes to run in Linux, I wasn’t looking forward to being her personal tech support slave.

Yes, the new version of Ubuntu can easily sync iPods (and other Apple devices), and there are several good music management apps like iTunes (the current version of Banshee integrates nicely with Amazon’s mp3 store); however, if one has older DRM tunes purchased through the iTunes store, reconciling all of this can be an ugly process. In the next 6-12 months I see this situation continuing to improve as Apple is beginning to have some serious competition in the online music purchasing business. Could we have just run out and bought her a Mac? Perhaps, but the stumbling block is cost, and of course openness.

For the small business owner? it really comes down to who will support you… if you have a great support vendor, or internal resources, this is a great direction, especially if your core business applications can be done in the cloud.

Are you someone who’s made the jump? or are you sticking to Windows 7? or are a Mac user who thinks Ubuntu is blatant rip off? Feel free to leave a comment.

Since moving to a web-based tool for task/list management, what has consistently been awkward is managing the interconnection between emails, actions and status. Yes there are ways of emailing tasks to Toodledo or Nozbe; however, in my experience it is far from an organic integrated process. While productivity zealots warn about living one’s life in an email client, I find that email is a vital component of keeping on top of my interests. As noted in this blog, I’ve moved to using Google Apps (Gmail) over the last couple of months and keep a dedicated browser open on a separate screen for Google’s Apps (in tabs) and Toodledo (always open in its own tab), and I’ve been finding that I’m using Toodledo less and less. I have no real gripes with Toodledo as it is a very powerful list manager; however, in spite of its integration points, it is a bit of an island.

I recently discovered and implemented GTD coach Kelly Forrister’s Gmail GTD method described here.  This, along with Gmail’s multiple inbox feature (I have inboxes for Next Action, Waiting For, Actions and Someday) approximates something of what I once did in the Outlook add-on. Using Kelly’s system, I’m almost at a point where I’m saying to myself, should I continue to manage these two separate islands, or can I do it all in Gmail?

The weakest part of adapting Gmail for this type of task/status management is that emails are not really task objects, thus once an email is created you can’t really manage the subject properly. Also, since they are not really tasks, the “completion/status” life cycle is not properly documented. And of course, the collaboration/tracking of others is hard to do.

If you’ve ended up at this post, I suspect many of you have struggled with the same. Can Gmail alone be your “trusted” system? Do you need a separate list/task manager?

Read the rest of my case study @ Internet.com’s EnterpriseMobileToday here: http://bit.ly/drof2u

I miss your BlackBerry. This is NO fun.

Truth be told, had I had a physical keyboard, I probably would have a more fluid electronic conversation thread with her. So in spite of having Swype (a great keyboard replacement for my Google Nexus One smartphone), the reality is that I am reluctant to to type much on my device and find myself thinking twice about doing anything that requires much text input.

This is true of email, but also of “texting.” While terse communication is more accepted here, sometimes this is the best way to reach some people–for some folks SMS messaging is a much more reliable means of interaction. Sometimes “K” or “C U l8tr” are just enough, but I’m rarely hot to do more than grunt using my touchscreen device. Interestingly enough, I’ve felt kind of liberated by the fact that I discovered that I can “text” these people from inside of Gmail, using the “Text Messaging in Chat” lab module.

Sometimes I Need More than Less
Now some people will say that touchscreen devices encourage an improved “less is more,” communication, but IMHO that’s really folks trying to justify the choice of their slick iPhone, Droid, or now iPad. Yes there are all the cool apps, and you have the computing power of something that used just sit on your lap or your desk, but trust me this is not a good input device, no matter what any of the marketing is saying.

I’ve been a mobile “device” guy now for 15 years, so I’m no neophyte here. I’ve owned my share of devices, including an original Palm Pilot, Casio Cassiopeia, a Vadem Clio, a Palm V (one of their best), an early Windows smartphone (brand or model that I don’t remember as it was not especially memorable), an iPod, and several different Blackberrys. I also used a Motion tablet (based on Windows tablet edition) as my main computer for 2 years.

As I hard as I tried, I eventually dumped the tablet and went back to a keyboard.

Now I’ve never owned an iPhone (or iPad), so the Apple fanboys in the crowd can throw stuff at me for lumping them in with everyone else, but I can’t imagine that input wise for day in day out chores, that it’s much better than my Nexus One.

Touchscreen Devices Are Great, But
Touchscreen devices are great for selecting things, especially if they are well designed and don’t give you too many choices. The interface to my Honda navigation system is a good example, but in spite of how sleek it feels to lose the keyboard, if you need to input stuff (and I’m someone who does), keyboards are just better. Good luck writing this post on an iPad.

Speech recognition can obviously work great too, but again the key is limiting choice like the beloved Vocera devices that my company TPC Healthcare supports. Still regardless of how much better recognition has become, it’s best for “commands” not for free form conversation, or “writing,” especially under mobile conditions. I do use my Honda’s speech rec (“XM Channel 57″ works great), also Google’s on my Nexus One, but it still is not there yet (and trust me I’ve tried).

I’ve not completely given up on the Nexus One, but I may yet. If Google made a fast Android device with a good integrated physical keyboard that ran on AT&T’s network, I would buy it tomorrow (the Milestone is an option, but probably smart to see what the next generation brings). And I’m not counting RIM out either. Once they have a webkit browser, they will become relevant again, especially if they continue to make the phone experience excellent.

And the 10″ netbook that I’m  writing this on is cheap, readable, fast, accurate, and very portable. It doesn’t have the panache of the Apple or Google brand on it, and I’m not going to slip this into my pocket, but clearly shows the challenging gaps that still need to be overcome.

One of course shouldn’t assume that the beautifully crafted site with lots of graphics and nested content will miraculously adapt it’s design to fit on the small screen. WPtouch, assumes that the mobile user needs the facts fast, and by applying very skinny design to your content, it does the job remarkably well (especially for free). In fact, I chose on the first go round, to adapt our contact page and make it be a new mobile home page. In one quick screen, someone hitting our site from their mobile device can found out what we do and now how to contact us. What a concept…

You Need Multiple Remedies
In addition to being careful regarding where one treads online, the real lesson is that one needs to use multiple remedies for these types of things, as the bad guys are really crafty and it’s hard for any one of these solutions to cover it all. In fact, there are many out there who will tell you that if you are infected with this type of malware, the best remedy is to wipe the machine and restore to the system’s original state using the manufacturer’s restore partition or CD/DVDs. I was absolutely ready to do that, but the pains of bringing the system back up to its current state software and configuration wise was not anything I was looking forward to (especially with an impatient  almost 12-year old hanging over my shoulder). And yes, if she were running an Apple machine, or Linux like her Dad, she would not be subject to this type of infestation, but let’s not cover that here.

For the working masses who own Windows machines (still in the ~90% range by all accounts), I would highly recommend running 2-3 of these malware remedies regularly (perhaps once a week, or at least once a month), and not just in a time of crisis. Trust me, if you are running Windows, preventative maintenance is necessary. And in spite of the false sense of safety you might get by running McAfee, or Norton, or the security suite of your choice, your anti-virus software being up-to-date, and running utilities like Ccleaner (really has no impact on these kinds of things), are not enough. And I can guarantee that when you run these remedies they will find stuff, regardless of how careful you think you are being.

This Week’s Windows Toolkit
Malwarebytes helped irradicate daughter’s issue. I also used A-Squared and Spybot Search and Destroy. These programs all have a free version (the real difference about the free versions is that they often don’t come with real-time protection or scheduling). I’m by no means religious about these brands, and there are many other good programs that can help. And while one can truly try to stay away from bad websites and never click on stuff you’re not sure about, it’s increasingly hard and almost impossible to avoid. My larger point is that you should use multiple products and do it regularly.

If you are little bit technically inclined, I really like Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, which allows you to create a completely free and comprehensive recovery environment that boots from a CD or USB drive and includes both anti-virus and anti-malware tools. If your machine is really sick, and your are you can follow some basic technical instructions, this CD can be a life saver (e.g. it can allow you to get your data off of a machine that just won’t boot up).

Make sure that when you install any of these programs that you run the updates for each of them. In the case of the anti-malware tools, once you run them, make sure that you execute the sequence that will actually remove or quarantine the issues it finds.

Image Your Machines. It’s easier than you think
Also, once you’ve done this, I would highly recommend “imaging” your machine (e.g. NOT backup, but a restorable image). For Windows, I like Macrium Reflect (also free), which can run from inside of Windows and image to either external USB or network drive. Backing up your documents regularly is a given, but by making an image you can then get your system back to a known good state is easily if you ever completely hose your machine (and chances are that could happen). I try to make a system image once a month.

Yes all of this sounds like an incredible pain, but if you rely on your computer for business, entertainment, balancing the checkbook, or whatever your needs are, this is kind of like changing the oil in your car.

Our Goal: Retain as Much Continuity as Possible for Mobile Users
Trying to maintain a continuously synchronized wireless environment for our Blackberry users was an important goal for me. I wanted it to be as BES-like on the user side as possible. At this point, we’re most of the way there. If I were starting from scratch, here’s what our “To Do” list would have looked like. Note, that if you are not coming from a BES-based environment, this post is not for you.

1. Migrate users Exchange data to Google Apps first. No matter how you slice and dice it, moving a mailbox that has been building up over many years can be messy, especially if a Blackberry is involved. The key here is create a single master repository and make sure things look they way you want it. There are many ways of doing this, including Google’s new Exchange-based mechanism; however, I found that using Google’s IMAP migration tool was cleanest for us.
2. Clean calendar and contacts migration can be tricky. For calendaring and contacts, after many experiments we found that doing .csv-based uploads was also cleanest (and yes we tried Google Apps sync). As hard as Google engineers have tried to make this easy, Outlook/Exchanged based mailbox data structures can get screwed up over time, especially if users have ever had any kind of plugins involved, or have ever used 3rd party synchronization tools. I found that using .csv was fast and accurate with the least amount of heartache. There are some short coming to this (recurring meetings will get replicated, rather than retain their recurrence), but I’m not sorry we did it this way. If you decide to do the the .csv thing, make sure your users specify a wide data range if they want to preserve past and future calendar entries (e.g. we chose 2/1/2006 – 2/1/2012). If you’ve never done this before, you can try this recipe
3. Break the connection between the Blackberry device and the BES. For the enterprise, the Blackberry Enterprise Server is the secret sauce for management, control, and security. Fortunately, our former Exchange provider AppRiver doesn’t lock down the devices security policy wise on their hosted BES. In the event, that you find yourself with devices that have a BES security policy, you will want the BES admin to send a blank security policy to the device. If for whatever reason you find yourself in a situation where you don’t have access to the BES admin, this link details how you can roll your own without help of the BES. We were determined to not completely wipe the devices, but if your users can deal with that, a complete wipe is probably not a bad idea.
4. Prepare a machine with a copy of a recent copy of the Blackberry desktop software. In order to avoid duplication of messages during initial synchronization with Google Apps, I advise wiping the “messages,” “address book,” and “calendar” databases off of the Blackberry’s you’re working with. Again, the best data integrity will come from having one master and making Google be it made the most sense to me. If your users must have access to their old mail on their device, skip clearing the messages database. Some other things to keep in mind as you approach this:
   1. Turn off wireless reconciliation for each of the core databases. This link will show you how. If you don’t do this, you will not be able to clear the databases using the desktop manager
   2. Wiping the databases entails using the Backup and Restore feature in the desktop software. Not a bad idea to make one last backup of the device databases and save them to somewhere safe. Use the Advanced option described here to clear the databases from the device (this link only describes how to do the address book, but you can apply the process to the other databases too).
5. Delete the “Desktop” service book from the devices. There are many sets of instructions on the net on how to do this. Here’s one in case you can’t find this on your own. This step allows the device to forget about it’s former partnership with a BES.
6. Make sure to enable IMAP in the respective user’s Google Apps Gmail account. This is not turned on by default, so  you will need to go into the user’s email settings as described here.
7. Get your users BIS credentials and Setup Up Each User with IMAP. If a device never had personal email addresses associated with it, creating a new account is pretty straight forward. If your users have already been using their devices for “personal” email, chances are they set up an account with the Blackberry Internet service from the device itself. Ask the users if they remember the users name/password combination (many will not, and you may end up calling the carrier to find out). Keep in mind that the end point for this migration, will be an IMAP connected Blackberry that uses the Blackberry Internet Services (BIS), and you will need to either create a new BIS account (for the user that hasn’t already done this), or associate Google Apps IMAP configuration with the device’s PIN. In practice, it is much easier to do from the web, rather than from the device. You can find links to the respective carriers here. While it is possible to do this from a wizard on the device, the web-based interface is much easier, especially if one using a touch-screen based Blackberry.
8. Resend the Service Books from the BIS. On the newer version of the BIS, you will find this option under the “Help” menu. While this isn’t absolutely necessary, this kind of completes the housekeeping in converting over to BIS-based email.
9. Install the Enhanced Gmail plugin.  This Blackberry plug in brings the Gmail experience to your device, allows you to archive emails, use labels, and look at threaded conversations in a gmail-centric way. If you ask around you will find that some people love it, and some hate it. Usability wise it doesn’t feel very Blackberry like, and some have reported that it’s slow.  I’d suggest installing it, as it doesn’t take away the normal methods of interacting with email on your Blackberry (the native email now configured for IMAP and Gmail will still work). Details on setting up the plugin are here.
10. Install Google Sync on the Blackberry devices. This device side application will make your device whole again as it relates to calendar and contacts. In practice it works quite well and you won’t notice it’s there. There’s a link on this page that will send an SMS with a link to the mobile application set up. Once setup this runs in the background in provides a 2-way synchronization of the core PDA apps. Heads up, Notes, and Tasks will not sync.  According to Google the “automatic” setting (the default), syncs every 2 hours, or every time you change an event on the device.
11. Call your carrier and change the data service for the Blackberry to the PDA plan, rather than the corporate or BES-type plan. In the case of AT&T this downgrade saved us $15 per month per user.

And let’s say that in spite of bad rap that the various carriers take (I’m with AT&T); they would have handled my situation so much better. And Zappo’s, in spite of the ordering confusion (on whomever’s side), I would have walked away from the transaction with a smile and confidence that would make me easily come back to them for lots more stuff. Now Zappos doesn’t sell the Google phone, but ah we should wish they did And maybe if Google figured their way through their customer service weaknesses (in this and other areas), they would be able to sell a lot more Nexus Ones (which are apparently not selling as well as hoped for).

So What Happened Mr. Schiff?
I put the hammer down last Wednesday on the just released AT&T-ready Google Nexus One. I’m one of those folks who prefers to shop online (I put my Honda Accord from CarsDirect sight unseen). So I happily went to Google’s website and plunked down $1,058US for 2 devices purchased without a contract and no strings attached to my carrier (I covered my thinking on this previously here). The transaction part was easy… and the devices were on my doorstep within 36 hours.

I quickly take the old SIM card out of my Blackberry Curve, stick it into the Nexus One and I’m off and running. The device boots. Phone calls work. I can surf the web… All is seemingly good in smartphone land. Several days into my Android weekend fog (learning how to use the thing) running it on my home network, I realize that device is has not once managed to get on AT&T’s 3G network.

OK, I’m thinking, I live in a heavily wooded area, maybe they don’t have coverage here. So I check the “map” and find out that I truly live in a blue state and there is 3G in most places I’d likely stray in my day-to-day travels. I drive down from the woods, still no 3G. Drive up to Danbury, still stuck on the AT&T’s 2G Edge Network. Something is off here.

So where does one go for help on this? Hard to know where to start
I do what I know how to do and head online (imagine if my Mom or Mother-in-law had the same problem?) Someone in one of the quickly developing Android community forum sites suggested it might be my old Blackberry SIM. Made sense, so I headed to the AT&T store. Nice folks over there, but they’d never seen one of them Google phones (agent scratches his head), but they happily upgrade my SIM no questions asked. Still no 3G. We reboot the phone, downgrade my data plan now that I don’t have a Blackberry in the mix, but that didn’t do it either.

The AT&T guys bid me good luck and I’m home to figure this out on my own. Next step is to head to Google’s phone website, and alas there was a real phone # to call: 1-888-48-NEXUS (63987)–at least you can call them. I was very quickly on the line with a very knowledgeable agent. Within less than 5 minutes, we figured out that I somehow ended up with a T-Mobile version of the phone, which because it wasn’t provisioned with the right radio would never work on the AT&T’s 3G network. Bingo… this should be easy to correct. Hah!

The agent asked me at the end of the call, how I’d rate the service on the call on a 1-5 basis (5 being best)… I emphatically said, 5!  I asked if he would set up an RMA for me (I was clearly too fast in my rating of the transaction), and he said that HTC would handle, but that he would get me on the line with one of their folks. OK, no worries. I was quickly talking to an HTC agent.

The Dreaded Restocking Fee
The new agent was very quick to advise me that if I’d used my phone, it would be subject to a $45US restocking fee. Thanks Mr. Agent, but I’m not one of those folks who kicked the tires and decided that perhaps an iPhone would be better for me. And yes, I just paid full boat for two devices! I quickly explained to the agent my tale of mistaken phone identity. Surely he would understand that there’s no way I would have ordered a T-Mobile phone, especially since I ordered two, and the other one we received was an AT&T one. And taking that one step further, the T-Mobile option was 2nd on the list of two that one could select on Google’s site, and it just didn’t make sense that I would be confused by that usability wise. I would have had to deliberately moused down to get to the T-Mobile one. I suggested to the agent that this was a supply chain error, and there’s was no way I was paying them $45 for their error.

I was getting nowhere fast with this guy, so asked that he escalate this to his supervisor. The supervisor gave me no satisfaction either.

In fairly routine fashion in spite of whatever angle I approached him from, he read me back the terms of service regarding open packages. He was careful to not give me an inch or set any expectation that I would end up doing anything else but paying them $45 for what was obviously my error. Surely I suggested that he must have some discretionary ability in these cases to make it right for the customer. “Sorry Mr. Schiff, but our system says you bought a T-Mobile device, which we delivered per the terms of service.”

And even if he felt compelled by my story, he reiterated that “his systems were not capable of accommodating any kind of reversal for this type of issue.” He wasn’t budging. OK, I asked if I could talk to his supervisor. “Sorry, it’s after 6 PM and there’s no one around who would be any higher up than I am.” I asked if I had any recourse, and he indicated that he can place a request within the system and that someone would get back to me in 24-48 hours, but I that he would do nothing to encourage me to believe that there would be a different outcome. OK, so I have a case #… Good luck!

The HTC  agents were professional and polite throughout, but I never had the sense that they cared a rat’s a*s about making it right for me, or anyone else. And in spite for the fact that I bought the phone from Google, they were gone from the transaction. The Google guy was great technically, but he had no capability of closing the loop on this own, and no ownership over what happened. By the book, he did his job, but clearly there was something missing. Once I was shoveled off to HTC,  the message was pretty consistent throughout. Per them, there’s no way that I as a customer could be right. No benefit of the doubt in their world.

High Volume Online Transactions and Quality Customer Service are Not Mutually Exclusive
In the end I am likely to eat the $45 here, and in the big scope of things, this is really a small story not worth crying too much about. Still, high volume online transactions and customer service can be delivered much better than this. Zappos, LL Bean, and Amazon come to mind. These are folks that know how to do this right. I’ve bought and returned tons of electronics items from the likes of NewEgg.com and Buy.com without friction… and I’ve gone back to those sellers time and again because of the trust that they will do what’s necessary to make it right. I go to buy something from them, I know I won’t get the third degree if something needs to be returned.

The Google/HTC thing is still very young. As they move out of the pure world of bit and bytes, one hopes they get better touch with their customers as human beings rather than just transactions.

Update 1: It appears that others have experienced the same problem with getting shipped the wrong N1. So if you’re buying a Nexus One from Google be careful during the checkout process, but also when you receive the device. Here’s some info to help you clearly see what you’ve purchased…

If it’s AT&T, your invoice will say:
Nexus One phone (GSM 3G 850/1900/2100MHz)

If it’s T-Mobile, your invoice will say:
Nexus One phone (GSM 3G 900/AWS/2100MHz)

Careful, during the checkout process this is far from from obvious. And once you receive the device, there’s nothing on the actual device or box that clearly identifies a device as T-Mobile or AT&T.

The only way to know for sure is to look inside behind the battery, or on the white box that the device is packed in (next to the bar codes).

The T-Mobile device will read: PB99100
The AT&T device will read: PB99110

Update 2: It appears that my “case” didn’t get far on its own within the walls of HTC. I decided to give them a follow up call with my case # in hand. This time around I was not stonewalled and a supervisor was quickly brought in a waived the restocking fee. So if you get stonewalled, make sure to keep pushing, get a case # and make sure to follow up. HTC can be reached directly @ 888.216.4736