And The Winner is... The Blackberry 9800 Torch!

Last December I started shopping for a new cell phone. Although I had done my homework and was familiar with all the technical specifications my final decision wasn’t made until April after I finally had the time to play around with several examples at the local AT&T store. To be perfectly honest—there wasn’t one that I didn’t like. Considering the major “smartphones” available it would seriously be difficult to make a “bad” choice. I immediately liked the “feel” of the Blackberry and I really liked the fact that it had a slide-out keyboard. I was upgrading from an old Motorola Q9 and whenever I had used my friend’s smartphones or my wife’s iPod, I found the touch screen keyboard to be awkward and tended to make mistakes when texting but liked it for running applications. So this model seemed to offer the best of both worlds.

Unlike other Blackberry’s the 9800 did not have a “trackball” but instead a touch pad. The main reason I had avoided getting a Blackberry until now was because of the trackball. The new OS 6, the Social Networking Feed application, the 5 megapixel camera with GPS, and built in Wi-Fi support were all plusses. One reason I had gotten the Q9 was to be able to run Windows and applications such as Excel and Word. However, you will find it is almost impossible to do any real work with these applications on such a small screen. The “Sheet to Go” and “Word to Go” are more than adequate for reviewing documents and are included on the Blackberry at no extra cost. But the clincher was that the phone would cost me nothing extra as I was actually overdue for an upgrade—so it was truly a no brainer. One month later, I like it more than ever and ironically am using the touchscreen almost exclusively for texting. My wife also liked the 9800 so much that she got one of her own!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

EOQ Calculations in Excel

Image
Last week in Operations Management we used Excel to calculate the Economic Order Quantity and graph Carrying Costs, Ordering Costs, and Total Costs. The Economic Order Quantity or "EOQ" is the order size that "minimizes" Total Costs. Any more or less and you are spending too much on ordering or too much on keeping inventory. For example, in the Excel spreadsheet below, if you had an Annual Demand of 12000 units, Ordering Costs of $10 per order, and Holding costs of $4 per unit per year, the EOQ would be 245 units and Total Costs would be $980.00: We used the following formula in Excel to calculate EOQ: =SQRT((2*B2*B3)/B4) And the following formula to calculate Total Costs at this point: =$B$6/2*$B$4+$B$2/B6*$B$3 To create the graph, we used the following formulas and simply copied them over a range of 100 to 500 units. Ordering Costs: =$B$2/D2*$B$3 Holding Costs: =D2/2*$B$4 Total Costs: =F2+G2 Looking at this chart, we can clearly see that our order size of 245 is ...
Read more

Reliability Calculations in Excel

Image
In Operations Management today we used Excel to calculate product reliability. Reliability is defined as "the ability of a product, service, part, or system to perform its intended function under a prescribed set of circumstances" (Stevenson, 2009). In order to calulate reliability over a given length of time we need to use the following formula: P(no failure) = e -t/MTBF where: e = 2.7183 t = Length of service before failure MTBF = Mean Time Between Failures One of the cases we did in class involved an auto detailing company that wanted to calculate the reliability of its vacuum cleaners. Excel provides an "EXP" funtion that we can easily apply here. After entering all data for the problem as shown on the spreadsheet below, we type the formula =EXP(-A5/$B$2) in cell B5 and copy down. Next we plot the distribution for t=0 to the maximum life expectancy of 20 years using a line graph. What we end up with looks like a classic case of "ex...
Read more

“How Are We Doing?” Efficiency, Utilization, and Productivity

Image
In business, knowing how we are performing in relation to our competition is vital. Internally we want to know if we are using resources effectively and getting the most out of what we have. Efficiency and Productivity are two calculations that are fundamental to the success of any organization. While the calculations are simple, choosing what measures to use and collecting the necessary data requires a thorough understanding of your industry. To calculate Efficiency you will have to first decide what to use as a base for comparison. Does your company already have a “target” of some kind? Like total units produced? If so then you can compare everything to that. Once you have that, there are a couple of basic formulas that can be used: Efficiency = Actual Output/Effective Capacity X 100% Utilization = Actual Output/Design Capacity X 100% Design Capacity is the maximum output achieved under ideal conditions. Effective Capacity is always less than Design Capacity because of factors...
Read more