The internet, however, came to the rescue and I got a few pointers that I added to what I did to revive my phone.

• The first thing I did, as soon as it happened was to pull the phone out of the water. No “Oh my God, what just happened?” or “Shit, my phone fell in it” and then proceed to stand there and stare at the thing for several minutes kind of stuff! Reach in and pull the damn thing out of the water whether it’s a swimming pool, sink, lake – probably with the help of a very good swimmer or a scuba diver since it’s just a phone and there is no sense drowning yourself too, or toilet (please, put on gloves). Eew.
• Take the battery out of the phone if it has a removable battery. That, by the way, is my biggest gripe against the iPhone and its ilk that do not have removable batteries and why I do not own one.
• Next, I got out as much of the water as I could. Mine has a slide-out keyboard, so I opened the phone and dried off the water with a gentle shake, using absorbent napkins.
• I strongly resisted the urge to immediately turn the phone back on (OK, after I read that it was not a good idea to do so)
• I put the phone near an open window to air-dry for about 15 minutes. Some suggest using compressed air – the type you use on your keyboard – to blow out the water. I tried it and it got quite a lot out. But I was also worried that the air may push water to more sensitive areas, further causing damage to the phone. So, your mileage may vary. Quick note: if using compresses air, make sure the can is upright as a tilted one can dispense freezing liquid which may not be good for your phone.
• I resisted the temptation to put it in the microwave or use a blow-dryer. Do not put your phone in a microwave, or use a blow dryer on your phone!
• Finally, as ridiculous as it initially sounded to me, I put the phone and its battery in an air-tight box (a jar would also work)  and covered it with uncooked rice. Apparently Rice is very good at absorbing moisture. There is also some sort of drying compound you can use, but rice was available and I really did not feel like ordering some compound that would take several days to show up.
• I let the phone sit in uncooked rice for an endless 72 hours! That was pure torture. If you only have one phone, I will pray for you. I never knew we depended on the thing this much. I totally felt disoriented the first couple of hours – no calls, no emails, no web browsing, no text messages, no twitter, no voice mails, no games. Luckily, I had several decommissioned phones around that I could use as “temps”.

Believe it or not, after 72 hours, I put the battery back on the phone and heard the most beautiful music in the whole world – a start up chime that indicated my phone was alive. I did it. I saved my drowned phone.

FYI, the weasels who manufacture these phones have inserted a tool that lets them know whether your phone went for a swim. Somewhere on your phone, usually below the battery, there is a white little circle or dot. When your phone gets wet, this dot changes color depending on the severity of the water damage. Some turn to pink (salvageable), others turn super red (God help you). Mine was half-n-half. My thinking is that this tool allows the phone manufacturers to laugh at you when you try to claim that the phone “just stopped working” and demand a replacement after you washed it with your laundry. Most phone warranties do not cover water damage.

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As a business person, I am always on the move – seminars, conferences, client visits etc. At the same time, I need to keep up with what’s happening and more importantly keep up with trends in the industry. To that end, my smart-phone is virtually my computer and speed is essential. I get my emails on my phone, hold video conferences on it when possible and browse the web. To make these a little faster, I disabled flash and JavaScript on web browsers and disabled HTML rendering on my email client.

Lately, due to an ever tighter schedule, I have had very little patience for emails, newsletters and web sites that insist on using JavaScript, Flash and  HTML rendering or nothing. They would not open for you to at least get a gist of the content. My guess is that this is all driven by the need to track users or capture some ad dollars, but the inexperience is annoying, to say the least. The easiest thing to do is immediately move away from the web site of simply delete the email or newsletter. This is sad because some of them do have great content that one would like to read. But as soon as I see:

Oops! You may not be able to view this message in your mail client as HTML. Please copy blah-blah-blah to the address field of your browser

I just hit the delete button. If in 2010, some people are too lazy to program their messages to render as plain text if HTML is not available, they do not deserve my time. As a matter of fact, I am so disgusted with some that I simply unsubscribe from their list. It does not have to be pretty for people to get your message. Just get the message across as many have found ways to do. I read the newsletters and emails of these folks who get it. If I am interested enough and want more information, I go to the web site and put up with the annoying Flash or JavaScript, and the stupid request for my life history before I can download a crappy 2-page “White Paper”.

The same goes for a web site. Unless you have JavaScript and/or flash enabled, some sites just remain blank! No text, no static images, nothing. This is the height of laziness. Just because you bought a flash or JavaScript infested template does not mean you should not do some work to at least show something. When I encounter websites like these, I simply leave. They do not deserve my time no matter how great the content may be. A simple online search for the topic gives me equally great sites and content without the hassle of JavaScript and/or Flash. These technologies are meant to enhance a web site, not be the web site.

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The Symbian Foundation has announced the availability of its web application development toolkit for the open-source Symbian^3 mobile platform. The new platform allows programmers and web developers to augment their skills with the use of “just a few more JacaScript APIs” in order to access capabilities like contacts, camera, location etc. on a symbian powered handset.

According to a statement from the foundation, anyone who can create a web page can create an app for Symbian^3, as coders only need standard development tools including HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

“Now anyone can create fantastic applications for devices such as the Nokia N8, the world’s first Symbian^3 device. These Symbian web application development tools provide an ideal entry point for web developers targeting the vast, new development opportunities offered by the Symbian^3 platform and the wider mobile marketplace, where compelling applications are proving their ability to fuel communities,” Symbian Foundation chief Lee Williams said in the statement.

The Symbian web app development toolkit is available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Other web development environments can be used to write apps for Symbian, but the foundation is promoting features of its toolkit that include mobile-specific application preview, debugging and deployment capabilities”.

Read the rest of the story here.

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As neat as many of its features are, it is still missing a lot. As with anything made by Apple, the hype get to you. While the tablet form factor has been rattling around for a while, most recently as the HP tablet announced at CES, not much has come out of those announcements. The hardware behind the iPad seems beautiful, as you’d expect from Jobs and his team, and the prices are typical Apple as well, starting at $500 and topping out at $829.

Apple’s iPad is, in essence, a bigger version of the iPhone and shares some of the same drawbacks, such as a non-swappable battery, missing Adobe Flash support and the lack of multitasking in the operating system. You also have to wonder about the 1024×768 resolution -  an old-school 4:3 screen dimension, when an HD-friendly 1280×720 might have been a better choice. This is especially true if iPad users plan to view their favorite TV shows and movies.

For the corporate user, I wonder how the iPad fits in: there are no USB ports, no SD slot, the battery is the usual non-removable type from Apple. How is it possible that Apple would skip USB, SD and swappable battery for easy compatibility with today’s standards? Stunning.
It is already bad enough that we have to carry around a cell phone for communicating and a laptop for getting work done.

A truly useful device would be one that could let us leave one of those devices and its added bulk, cables, and worries about charge status at home. It would be nice to have a device that can at least, replace a couple of those and the iPhone went a little way towards that dream—it was a phone, but its ability to handle a bit of web browsing and some light e-mail meant that leaving the laptop at home was possible in a few additional circumstances—but, for the most part, we are still stuck lugging two devices.

At the prices Apple is asking, many netbooks and notebooks are a better value — if you can stand the thought of dragging that twentieth-century keyboard around with you. A MacBook or good PC notebook can perform a wider variety of tasks and runs a much more capable set of software.

It’s still too costly, it’s still yet one more device, and it’s still missing too much for the corporate user. It’s not that the iPad is not impressive, because it is. There is no doubt that the iPad will find a market. I just don’t think it comes close to justifying the hype we’ve heard these past couple of days.

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I recently bought a couple of NAS devices and each one of them failed woefully to do what was advertised.

First is what I actually started calling the Great White Turd. It is the Netgear sc101T. I have come across ridiculous devices before, but this one takes the cake for its total uselessness as a NAS device. What is the point of hard coding a “NAS” to use DHCP and no option of setting a static IP address. What part of “network” was missing during the development of the product? The SC101T forces you to install a client software on all computers that may need access to the device. The software cannot be installed on a server class Operating System like Windows Server 2003 or 2008. You have to mount the drive and share it to be accessible but since it is assigned a DHCP IP address, anytime you restart the computer, the drive mappings are shot to hell and you have to do it all over. For a product that retails for $180, I am almost tempted to start a class action lawsuit so we can recover some lost revenue due to emotional distress caused by this piece of crap.

Next is the Iomega StorCenter ix2. I was actually enthusiastic when I picked up this $300 device – compact case, easily accessible drive compartments, sleek brochure, nice web interface etc. That enthusiasm quickly vanished when I wanted to replace the two 500GB hard drives that came with it with 2 ITB  drives I had lying around. Never happened. It looks like these geniuses installed the free Linux NAS software on the hard drive instead of loading it as a ROM on the device. To make things worse, the software would not work on Windows Server 2000, 2003 and 2008. The EMC Retrospect backup software that is included is crippled because you cannot install it on a server. What am I missing? Since when did network Operating Systems become taboo in managing network devices? This lazy attempt to copy Microsoft by segmenting everything as Home, Road, Workplace, Media, Professional, Ultimate etc. is really annoying. Everyone is jumping into the NAS market with all kinds of totally useless devices with fancy titles and making billions of dollars while cranking out repackaged USB devices that should be retailing for nothing more than $50.

I had the same problem with Buffalo Linkstation TeraStation II a while back and encountered the exact same limitations. I could not use the device in a network environment with Active Directory even though the product was advertised as being compatible with an AD environment. After sending a blistering email to the support team, they offered a  replacement with a $2500 model and I had to pass.

When I was going through a box with old box with old devices, I came across a Franklin eBookman 901. It was still in its original box so I decided to try it out. I can tell you right now that I am seriously praying for that company to go bankrupt. The stupidity of their configuration is inexcusable. For some weird reason, they coded it so you cannot access the device unless it is plugged into a USB port. Totally unnecessary. I should not need a USB port to use the other functions of a “PDA-Like” device. Needless to say, I promptly trashed it.

I strongly believe OEM’s are very calculated in the way they release these products to the public. The mindset is that after buying the “Home/crippled” edition” which will obviously fall short of what you need it for, you will be “encouraged” to buy the next one in line which is ultimately more expensive and is just a re-badged version of the one you currently have with some disabled functions enabled. To me, this is the worst form of deceptive trade practice.

What I ended up doing was buying a 2-port SATA adapter and slapping it on an old PC I had on hand. I added two 1TB hard drives and installed the free Linux software called FreeNAS which many of these vendors and manufacturers use (although they would rather have you not know that) and I had a fully functional NAS  appliance. Total cost, less than $200 ($87 each for the drives, $20 for the SATA card).

This is a very serous problem, especially for small business owners. Not everyone has $2000 – $15000 to spend on network storage. In many cases, a simple 1TB  USB device works great, but there are times when it is helpful to make a device available to network users so they can store files they deem critical on the network.

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