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There’s a brand new thing I just tried. Having around 16 years of IT experience under my belt (out of 14 years of official work experience overall) I just did something I haven’t done in a long long time. I just ordered a brand-name PC. I did bought two or three custom-built PCs before at computer fair, but never ever in my life did I purchase a brand-name desktop before. All my PCs were custom-built, from carefully researched and hand-picked components. But there’s something I have realized recently.

I realized that I don’t care. Or rather – I don’t have time to care that much. Instead of spending countless hours researching why certain memory brand is better then another, which letter in motherboard name means what feature and which revision supports what I am just going to order pretty much same configuration for pretty much same amount of money. If there will be a difference – it will justifiably offset by the work I’ll be able to get done instead of doing a research. In fact, I really believe that I will be able to earn more money in time I saved by not doing a research then I will be able to save by doing a deep and convoluted research.

This all comes as a part of my new (i.e. new to me, not to the sane people of the world) time management strategy – to manage my time with more scrutiny than ever. Down to a 15-minute intervals, if not less. Buying a branded PC instead of spending an estimate of 20 hours doing research should yield those 20 hours to earn money. If I can charge half that time to the median of my regular rates I would probably earn about $300 – 500 on top of covering an overpayment for this branded PC. Being able to delegate the responsibility of building and delivering a PC to my home allows me to concentrate on money-making activities instead of money-saving ones. What’s good about it is that there’s certainly a ceiling on how much money you can save. In the case of a spherical horse in a void space you can save only as much as you make. There is, however, no limit on how much you can make, so making money by default is much more profitable, than saving.

Time management, on the other side, is a bit different creature. You cannot make more time since there’s only 24 hours per day and only 7 days in any given week. Trust me, I checked. You can, however, save a lot of time by delegating second and third-grade activities (“should do” and “nice to do” things) to other people or institutions. Having custom-built hundreds of PCs I didn’t come easy to the idea of purchasing a PC off-the-shelf. Having been a small business owner for just a few years easily justified the rationale behind delegating this activity.

This is part 3 of the Customizing Your Smart Phone series (part 1, part 2). This time we will look at the most important part of customizing your phone – installing a new software for the radio in your smart phone. If you look at the specs of any phone, you will see a bunch of frequencies that phone is capable of operating on. The most universal is considered a GSM quad-band that consists of four bands of GSM/GPRS/EDGE frequencies: 850, 900, 1800 and 1900MHz. Whenever you hear a 3G moniker, or lesser known in Northern America UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA bands they usually refer to 800/850/1900/2100 devices operating in UMTS frequency bands (data interchange bands, as opposed to voice interchange). While these numbers mean little to an unprepared mind, it’s important to understand that a connection possibility and quality of the call directly relate to which bands are supported by device and cellular service provider.

What the radio (and it’s software part) does is basically take care of how well your cell phone radio and your GPS behave when doing directly what they supposed to do. Interesting enough, certain versions of radio software behave better in certain markets, so you might want to go through a little testing. Pack an extra phone (don’t forget to charge it too) in case your updated radio version really suck. I spent about an hour per each version of radio and I only tested last three, so you shouldn’t do any worse than that.

If you have a HardSPL installed, then flashing the radio (i.e. installing a new or updated software package for your radio) should present any surprises. There’s a belief, although with little, if any, backing to it, that between radio updates it is a good idea to flash a stock radio (i.e. one that came from either original equipment manufacturer or cell phone company). I can hardly believe it’s true, but you’re welcome to acquire your own experience. Do your homework and follow the instructions to the letter, as missing the steps that might look small or insignificant may result in bricked phone or a failed flash.

There’s not much to the process of flashing of a new radio except for following the instructions. Make note which exact version did you test and what were the results. Pick a few spots where you know for sure the reception was good, decent and bad and test there thoroughly. Number of bars, no matter how heavily promoted by AT&T’s commercials, doesn’t mean anything – make calls longer then 3 minutes, note the call quality during the call. Take note on a battery drain as different versions of radio may consume power differently and the last version does not necesserily means the best. Remember, that you are testing same hardware in the same locations and the only thing different is your phone radio’s software. Pick the one that works best for you and move on.

We’re back to our Customizing your smartphone series, this is part 2. This chapter will talk about step 1 in customizing your pda phone – the unlocking of your smart phone device.

Basically, there are two kinds of unlocking. One, called hard unlock (also known as HardSPL or Hard Second Program Loader), will give you total control over your phone, you will be able to replace anything and everything in regards to software. The drawback is that it will get obsolete with time, so newer software may not work or give you trouble if you have an outdated unlock. Additionally, your cell phone company will most likely give you a hard time if you bring the device for repair.

What this method does could be compared to updating your computer BIOS or upgrading the transmission in your car. It would still be the same hood and engine, but the driving experience will be different. You will most likely see a different flavor of programs that perform hard unlock depending on your phone’s model. However, the nature of each should be the same – they replace a firmware that is flashed into your phone’s memory to start on phone’s boot (thus the BIOS analogy). Once you replace that part – you’re good to go with updating other parts of you smart phone software.

Another one, called soft unlock (SoftSPL or Software Second Program Loader), is a temporary solution of sort. It is essentially a stand-alone .exe program that will go away once you reset your phone, but it still allows you to update certain parts of your smart phone software. Though not as good as previous and more cumbersome to perform, the soft unlock doesn’t leave its footprint embedded in phone’s persistent memory so you will see less red tape from cell phone provider. Additionally, if you ever need to replace your old HardSPL with an updated one, you can only do it with SoftSPL. So both are needed and both have their uses and disadvantages.

So far, most of the upgrades worth noting required installation of HardSPL, but you might be able to get away with SoftSPL if you try hard enough (and read a lot!). Getting your smart phone device a SIM-unlocked is a part of the deal and just a minor benefit. One of the major issues with SPL provided by your cell phone company is preventing you, the user, from flashing (i.e. writing to the persistent memory of your smart phone) the software you want and preserve the stuff your cell phone company wants you to have. Another – binding you to that specific provider, also known as SIM lock. Both HardSPL and SoftSPL take care of each part of it – either permanently or temporarily.