KVET.CH » blackberry

Before you get a BlackBerry

admin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:57:00 +0000

There are a couple of gotchas in using a BlackBerry that I think people should be aware of, especially in light of the onslaught of devices from RIM the last couple of months. People often ask me if the latest BlackBerry device is "better" than another device (usually they’re comparing it to an iPhone) and like anything else it really depends what you’re going to do with it.

What not a lot of people are aware of however, and where the BlackBerry really falls on its face, is email!

If you’re an Enterprise user with Exchange servers and you spend all day staring at Outlook, the BlackBerry is a fantastic tool. It does wireless sync with your email, Calendars, Address Book, and what you see on your BlackBerry is what you see in Outlook. It’s great!

But if you’re not an enterprise user, or you instead opt to support open standards like IMAP because it’s a better decision for you and your organization, you may be surprised to know that the BlackBerry takes an immeadiate nosedive in value.

You see, if you don’t invest thousands of dollars in software and more in hardware, you can’t do things like wireless sync of Contacts, Appointments, or email. Sure, you can outsource all of your email to a third party and let them juggle Exchange, BlackBerry Enterprise Server, policy edits, and provisioning, but that isn’t always an appropriate decision either. If you don’t use a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), you need to use BlackBerry Internet Service (BIS), which has some big limitations.

First and foremost, it doesn’t know know how to access your email folders.

That’s right! A BlackBerry using BIS will not be able to view, save to, browse, or give you access to any mail folders you have stored on the mail server. It is for this reason alone that many people don’t like using the BlackBerry, even though this limitation is something they don’t tell you about. The BlackBerry cheerleaders will tell you that it’s simple to fix, just simply migrate all of your email from your server to an Exchange Server! And buy a BES! Or move all of your email to some third party that specializes in locking you into BlackBerry email!

Reduced to its most simplistic explanation, your desktop computer doesn’t know if you’ve read an email or not, and since you can’t do any Folder operations, you can’t use your BlackBerry for email triage and filing mail to the archive folders, or sorting messages however you choose to do it on your desktop or notebook computer.

No thanks.

Gmail users however will appreciate that there is a Gmail application for the BlackBerry that is very good. The only problem is that it only talks to Gmail of course, so you’re in the same limited group with no access to your own email except through that party. The Gmail access is only "wysiwyg" in the Gmail application however, and not if you opt for mail delivery via the BlackBerry push system. Kind of defeats the purpose of having one inbox to work from, no?

BlackBerry is great mobile email for people that use Exchange, but it is severely limiting to you if you don’t, and adds even more cost on the back end to get access to basic features, such as folder access. If you are using a BES you get full wireless sync, contacts and calendars, and other features to bring the mobile PIM experience up from simple email transactions, but accessing an email folder is apparently "enterprise-only" as a feature to RIM.

The new T-Mobile and Google Android venture and the iPhone have given some great options for mobile email. Even Nokia S60 devices that have been coming out lately do a great job with IMAP. Personally I’ve been very happy with the iPhone but I’ve always got my eyes open for something that could address the iPhone’s shortcomings as well.

Thoughts on iotum Talk-Now for BlackBerry

admin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:47:38 +0000

There is an interesting thread on BlackBerry Forums (which is an amazing resource every BlackBerry user should be reading now and then) about a Presence application for the BlackBerry (and other platforms) called Talk-Now. There are a couple of big problems with this, which I pointed out in the thread.

Simply put, I have zero interest in maintaining yet another set of relationships with people.

First of all, the mobile space already has two very viable and already deployed and operational systems for handling presence and messaging. XMPP/Jabber and WV/IMPS.

So far, Jabber/XMPP isn’t heavily integrated into handsets very well. It is very much a separate application in user-land that doesn’t have the tight integration you really need with presence application. The implementations of Wireless Village/IMPS I see today are much better for such things. For example:

On many Sony Ericsson and Nokia handsets you can actually see the availability of a contact in the address book. So as you’re getting ready to call someone, you can see their presence right then and there. And you can opt to send them a message instead of calling them if they’re busy.

I would really like to see better implementations of XMPP on S60 and other handsets, however. I think that even having it integrated into the S60 Messaging application would be far preferable. But on the BlackBerry that disconnect still exists, and having an entirely different architecture and non-open system (which they say will be rolled into XMPP eventually) makes it even less attractive. XMPP is everywhere. And it can be everywhere. And the fact that it is federated makes it even easier to deal with, since you’re able to deploy however you want and allow communications between organizations with ease.

Why iotum trumpets the lack of messaging as a feature is beyond me.

The one thing I will give them credit for is that they say that they can set this availability and presence based on the metadata of the end user. Time of day, calendar, free/busy status, and other bits that are glued together. That is nice, really. But to not use XMPP or WV for sharing this information out is remarkably shortsighted for a product that otherwise wins out on features in spite of requiring an MS Windows architecture to be effective.

The problem is, how are they going to be any better or different from open standards once they mature on the handset? The user experience for these existing standards is already quite good, and I don’t see how they can expect to monetize their offering against the services that are actually pre-installed on handsets and supported by Operators themselves.

What happened to PocketMac?

admin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 22:36:06 +0000

PocketMac used to be this really responsive, fantastic company to deal with.

But lately they’ve been really a pain to deal with. The weird marketing emails, etc. And when I followed their instructions to unsubscribe from their spambot, I got a nice delivery failure.

This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification


Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:                         
     unsubscribe@pocketmac.net

Technical details of permanent failure: TEMP_FAILURE: SMTP Error (state 9): 452 Mailbox size limit exceeded

Nice. Way to go, guys. You got so many unsubscribes that your mail server started rejecting them.

RIM co-CEO sees no threat from iPhone | MacMinute News

admin — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:34:00 +0000

RIM co-CEO sees no threat from iPhone | MacMinute News:

A story out of Reuters today reports that Research In Motion’s co-CEO said in an interview that Apple’s iPhone doesn’t pose any threat to the company’s consumer-geared BlackBerry Pearl.

This also in: Mercedes isn’t threatened by Porsche’s new Cayman.

Most of the time, these two devices couldn’t be more different. They are geared for completely different markets.

But I think it is very naive to think that the iPhone will not cannibalize the entire market that wants a media-rich device that is easy to use and elegant. The BlackBerry consumer line lacks the cachet of the iPhone, and always will without significant re-investment in a consumer line of devices, which RIM will not do or seems wisely unwilling to do. The Pearl line is supposed to be individual-friendly, and provide solid messaging for the masses. But their software is clumsy, their user interface passé and dull, or completely confusing depending on who you ask, and the complete lack of real media capabilities on the entire BlackBerry line will hamstring them in the consumer market.

To be more clear—I feel strongly that RIM knows full well that they cannot continue to make handsets forever. They know that need to get out of the hardware business, and focus instead of infrastructure and software to move email the way they do.

Every other competitor they have is going this route, and they are going to start winning with more variety in devices. If RIM plays this right, they can continue to dominate the mobile email space without lifting a single handset above their heads.