Research In Motion's preliminary results for its just-concluded fiscal third quarter fell below its earlier forecast, with economic woes and product delays the prime culprits, the company said Wednesday.
The new BlackBerry 9530, or Storm, has the familiar fingertip navigation and flick-to-scroll gesture common to most widescreen phones. Apart from that, the Storm is very much its own device, unmistakably a BlackBerry in its strong messaging, connectivity, and extensibility, but carried to a new level of usability by a touchscreen display and a redesigned GUI.
Mobile solution decisionmakers, from individual professionals to CTOs, are beginning to see the need for style to play an increasing role in device selection, and the iPhone 3G is the de facto choice.
Apple's iPhone 2.0 OS brought Cisco VPN, Exchange Server email, and native custom applications to Apple's devices, bringing utility to the mix to make the iPhone an enterprise shoo-in. On style, the iPhone is unbeatable. As a lure for prospective employees, a salve for ailing morale, or an image-setter in a business meeting, the iPhone 3G is unmatched. For some millions of buyers, that's the whole story, full stop, and there is nothing wrong with that.
You may know that I have embarked on a project to supplant deployed BlackBerry handsets with iPhone 3G devices in an enterprise scenario. I've spent the past month or so with this.
There's too much to cover in one column, so I'll reveal my findings over several weeks, with this week dedicated to the user experience of a professional switched from BlackBerry to iPhone 3G.
Well, this is embarrassing, but I might as well blurt it out: The iPhone 3G that Apple loaned to me was stolen. I spent many days praying I'd let it slide under the fridge instead of having my bag pocket-picked. I worked hard to get iPhone 3G, worked harder to understand it, and just when I was getting to the good part — the part where I moved my mobile persona from BlackBerry to iPhone 3G — it was over.
The irony is that while I saw iPhone 3G as a dandy business handset, I didn't see it replacing my BlackBerry. As I routinely do, I chose to challenge this untested assertion. Over the course of one long day and a longer road, I discovered that BlackBerry to iPhone 3G is a transition I'd enjoy making, one I might make by choice. That was the last time I saw iPhone 3G.
I can't let my loss blind me to the good that preceded it. I opened myself to my iPhone 3G epiphany during a seven-hour road trip (it should have been five, but that's another story) to AMD's headquarters in Austin, Texas. I spent that trip with a BlackBerry 8800 and an iPhone 3G resting on my passenger seat, playing "anything you can do, I can do better" with them whole way. It was a delight. I was not a paragon of highway safety that night, but I learned more from that trip than I did from a solid week of lab testing.
During the trip, the handsets' attention, and mine, were divided primarily among email, browser (news.yahoo.com and phone bandwidth tests on dslreports.com), and real-time navigation. Running Google Maps in its satellite view on BlackBerry (on T-Mobile's EDGE network) and AT&T's iPhone 3G side by side made for a self-running test of the handsets' GPS and cellular sensitivity, and the differences between AT&T 3G and T-Mobile EDGE cell data networks in speed and coverage. I had the BlackBerry 8800 and iPhone 3G zoomed to exactly the same level so that I could see at a glance how well each was managing to pull constant updates from the network and paint changes to the display.
One goal here was to get to the bottom of 3G, and I did. Of the roughly 250 miles of Interstate 35 between Dallas/Fort Worth and Austin, only about 50 miles was covered by 3G. Whenever I hit the centre of a 3G coverage cone, I was blown away by bandwidth of 500Kbit/s to a peak of just over 1000Kbit/s per second. Speed dropped sharply with distance from city centres; I saw EDGE-class performance around 150Kbit/s just before iPhone's 3G indicator winked out and the radio re-acquired with EDGE.
3G, I've discovered, is not wi-fi lite. The aspect of 3G that doesn't come up in advertising is its killer latency, that being the delay between a client's request for data and the first bit of the server's response. On the 3G network, I measured packet delays server-to-phone of as long as 600 milliseconds, with 300 to 350 milliseconds being typical. By comparison, cable and DSL latency ranges from 30 to 70 milliseconds. Because web pages are made up of dozens of little files strung together, latency can overcome bandwidth such that a complex web page does not render markedly faster on 3G compared to EDGE. 3G is a blessing in email, a subject that I'll take up shortly.
My decision to mix tasks on the devices revealed differences in their usability. On the BlackBerry, I switched periodically among email, Google Maps, BlackBerry's standard-issue browser, and TeleNav, the last of these being a native turn-by-turn navigation system upon which I've become hopelessly dependent. BlackBerry runs these apps simultaneously, and I have a button assigned to switch from app to app. On iPhone 3G, I mixed it up with Google Maps, Mail and Safari. Apple's iPhone SDK doesn't permit simultaneous running of applications, but programs usually save their state when they exit and recover it on launch, giving the appearance of task switching.
BlackBerry's multitasking lets the voice guidance from TeleNav break through no matter which app is in the foreground. When you're reading mail or even taking a phone call, the BlackBerry TeleNav lady pops in with status and directions (the other party to your call doesn't hear them). That's not possible without background operation. Apple's official position is that iPhone apps may not run in the background, and turn-by-turn navigation is singled out as a mustn't-do for developers.
Both BlackBerry and iPhone 3G (and iPhone as well) truly push email. I tested against my lab's Exchange Server 2007, running in a virtual machine under Leopard Server on Xserve as well as through Apple's MobileMe and BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS). In all cases, once a message was sucked into what Apple calls "the cloud", which is the BlackBerry- or Apple-hosted delivery or notification network, the handset picked it up. BlackBerry push is instantaneous and it can squeeze the initial fragment of message through one-bar coverage too weak to support a voice call. This is the legacy of the two-way pager model.
iPhone 3G takes a few seconds to get a push message, but within a 3G coverage area the extra bandwidth makes it more likely that a message with attachments will be in your iPhone 3G inbox when you open the mail client. Even in EDGE coverage, iPhone 3G can pull in, unpack and display a message with rich (Office, PDF, iWork '08, HTML) document attachments far faster than BlackBerry because the document viewer is embedded in the framework, and iPhone 3G's UI is faster and friendlier than BlackBerry's for navigating in documents larger than the display.
No one mobile device does everything you'd like it to, but I can tell you what makes me miss iPhone 3G. I could forward all of my email, attachments included, and instead of making myself crazy tuning filters to block it, I'd just let memory-wasting spam slip through. That's what iPhone 3G's 16GB of flash is for. Like most everyone else I know, my inbox is my database, reaching back for months if not years, and I really felt secure knowing that if my servers caught fire, if my house was knocked over by a tornado, all of the irreplaceable information that's archived as email and attachments would be safe in my pocket.
I finally set up a new domain with a fresh Exchange Server 2007 setup (virtualised on an eight-core Xserve). This is taking a production validation beating as I write, and the point of setting that up is to skip from BlackBerry to iPhone 3G without an intermediate stop in the consumer-targeted MobileMe. I really want to see how device management is handled. I'm motivated to learn how well remote device locking and blanking work.
I am humbled and more than a little embarrassed by the loss of iPhone 3G, but now that it's taking shape, my BlackBerry-free project is too good to shelve.
Car parts supplier Repco has rolled out Auckland-based Zeacom’s latest communications suite across Australasia.
The competitive marketing brickbat that Apple flung at BlackBerry — that BlackBerry's push email works only with Microsoft Exchange, as if Exchange were an onerous burden — has quietly vanished from Apple's campaign.
Exchange Server turns out to be the only customer-hosted messaging back end supported by iPhone 3G and first-gen iPhones running 2.0 software. It's true that BlackBerry requires BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES), but BES integrates with Domino and Groupwise as well as Exchange, and BES works transparently with non-BlackBerry devices through BlackBerry Connect. I'll always be here to set the record straight.
If you balk at the extra $3,000 to $10,000 it takes to strap BES onto Exchange, then your needs are more basic. You may be best served by a third-party hosting provider, but even that can be overkill for individual professionals and small businesses. RIM's solution for individuals is BlackBerry Internet Services (BIS), its own hosted push messaging. BIS is bundled free with T-Mobile's BlackBerry coverage plans (I can't speak for other carriers), and it replaces an earlier consumer-targeted service that included a web-based mail reader and server-side message filters.
I liked that service, but it carried a stringent limit on mailbox size, which BIS does away with, in addition to the Web interface. On T-Mobile's network, messages aren't stored where you can get at them using anything but your BlackBerry, but BIS can keep an unlimited number of messages in flight until they're either fully delivered or they bounce to the sender after several days of failed delivery. BIS can maintain multiple mailboxes for each subscriber, with separate folders on the device's home menu and dedicated client-side filters (for example, vibrate for VIP messages even when the phone is in quiet mode). You can gateway POP3 mail through BIS, and although POP isn't inherently push-capable, once BIS picks up a message, it follows the same assured delivery path as any other BlackBerry missive.
Anything that's free comes with a catch, and in the case of BIS, it only handles email. You can send and receive appointments and individual contacts packaged as standard email attachments, but they don't hit your calendar or address book until you open the attachment. Also, unless you're running BES, your calendar and address book live only on your device until you manually back them up on your desktop. BIS affords users no gateway to the sort of live collaboration, shared folders, and instant messaging offered by Exchange and BES. That's why "enterprise" is BES's middle name.
Apple didn't frame .Mac, its subscription-based online service for Mac clients, as a solution for professionals. However, Steve Jobs touts .Mac's evolved form, MobileMe, as "Exchange for the rest of us" — quite a boast indeed. MobileMe, which costs US$99 per year or Us$149 for a five-user pack, is the only way non-Exchange users can get push email to their iPhones. MobileMe has that in common with BIS, but the similarities end there.
I am a longtime .Mac subscriber, so I'm familiar with MobileMe's features: 10GB of sharable online storage, slick AJAX mail, address book and calendar clients with sweet touches like recipient completion, the requisite personal website/blog, and photo gallery.
Fairly recently, .Mac took on a couple of new roles custom tailored for professional users. It provides manual or scheduled synchronisation of contacts, bookmarks, appointments, mail rules and mailboxes (not messages) across multiple Mac clients. Everything synced with your Mac is reflected immediately in MobileMe's web interface. Back to My Mac, also relatively new, is a secure screen-sharing gateway that burrows through residential Internet providers' NAT and router firewalls. For those of us who have more than one Mac, .Mac is our sanity's savior. MobileMe is at least that.
A simple characterisation of MobileMe is that it's .Mac with iPhone support. That would be enough to recommend it, but there's much more to it. MobileMe adds push capabilities for email, calendar and address book so that the clients and devices you enrol for synchronisation with your MobileMe account are updated within seconds of any change made by a client or via MobileMe's web interface. The update delay, as demonstrated by Apple, is minor — short enough to allay my suspicions that iPhone is just polling MobileMe at close intervals.
Based on Apple's claims, which I can't prove out until my iPhone 3G arrives tomorrow, MobileMe has the power to elevate iPhone to lead consideration among smartphones for mobile professionals. If MobileMe doesn't already read too good to be true, consider the grace note: Windows Outlook clients can now be joined to MobileMe's pool of push-synced clients. If calling MobileMe "Exchange for the rest of us" doesn't target MobileMe at individual professionals, then support for Outlook, which is hardly the mail client of choice for home users, makes a clearer case; $99 per year for push email plus over-the-air, cross-platform desktop/device sync is an absolute no-brainer.
I've contemplated, but not tested, the notion that Apple might have used ActiveSync or a protocol enough like it to fool Outlook, to push MobileMe messages and updates. Why not? We know that Apple licensed ActiveSync for its iPhone 2.0 software. I'm getting ahead of myself by imagining MobileMe as a premier individual messaging and sync service for Windows and Windows Mobile smartphones, but that'd be a kick in the head.
BIS may end up looking pretty anemic compared to MobileMe from a features perspective, but it executes its limited feature set flawlessly. There's no need to qualify my recommendation of BIS to a professional user that only needs push email with guaranteed intact delivery in both directions. I have used BIS in that role, on and off, for years. The problems I've had with it have been of my own making. MobileMe has to prove itself to be a bulletproof individual push messaging solution above all else, and I'll be taking regular and ruthless shots at it as I give iPhone 3G a chance to serve where BlackBerry has gone before it.
Enterprises don't need a stand-in for Exchange Server. Neither BIS nor MobileMe permit the building of workgroups, and they don't enforce policies or otherwise enable central management of devices. Organisations with these needs that have even a few handsets in their fleet will find Exchange, Groupwise or Domino a necessity. iPhone will have to earn its reputation as an enterprise device by mating with Exchange Server as seamlessly as my BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices do. But iPhone also has to satisfy the needs of one, two, or five users. MobileMe puts Apple on an ambitious path toward that goal.
IBM has released software that allows BlackBerry users to access more of its applications, including its Cognos business intelligence software and Lotus Connections.
Apple's market power derives not merely from its technology, but from its adeptness at reframing a familiar market to limit the field of competitors. In the most extreme example, Apple portrays its sole competitor as itself. The competitive messaging around MacBook Pro emphasised how it skunked PowerPC notebooks in performance. Later, Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro was sold as far superior to Core Duo MacBook Pro. Apple is 2X faster than Apple, so clearly, the smart money's on Apple.
At the press conference at which iPhone's Exchange Server connectivity and software development kit (SDK) were unveiled, Steve Jobs established and reinforced the premise that in eight months, iPhone has redefined the entire smartphone market. Windows Mobile and Symbian Series 60 are now irrelevant, leaving only two relevant players, iPhone and BlackBerry. Given that BlackBerry is old, tacky and unreliable, enterprises oughtn't waste time trying to prop it up. Out with the old, in with the new, he implied.
This mirrors the swipes that Apple used to take at Microsoft. They're always delivered with the Jobsian wink and smirk, but they are far from the offhand remarks they're packaged to be. They're very carefully targeted. In BlackBerry's case, Jobs took the opportunity to reveal some little-known information about BlackBerry — widely published, just not the kind of details that BlackBerry users care about — and portray it as a powerful disadvantage that makes the fresh technology that iPhone brings to the market a necessity. I grant that iPhone outshines BlackBerry as a platform for graphical mobile applications, with the drawback being that writing iPhone software for your personal use will cost you US$99 (NZ$122). In contrast, BlackBerry, Nokia, and Microsoft impose no charges. I think that Apple could have made more hay by showing a text-based custom BlackBerry app next to the same application done in Technicolour and full motion on iPhone. Instead, Apple focused its battle with BlackBerry on two simple points: BlackBerry handsets are ugly, and BlackBerry's network is old fashioned, insecure and unreliable.
I'll grant you, my BlackBerry 8820 is industrial in its styling. That was my choice. BlackBerry handsets are now in all sizes and colours, with the bonus that every model has matching messaging functionality. Consumers and fashion-conscious professionals have swarmed to Curve, BlackBerry's jazzy QWERTY handset, and more compact phone-like devices that have the same standard BlackBerry messaging capabilities. No BlackBerry's screen is as large as iPhone's, but iPhone's visible display space is cut considerably when the huge on-screen keyboard slides in. A BlackBerry squeezes more text onto its smaller screen, and both fonts and font sizes are adjustable to match your vision.
Every BlackBerry is operable with one hand, or if you use the in-handset voice dialing, no hands. Built-in GPS is there if you want it, with Google Maps and BlackBerry's own excellent mapping software showing you where you are and where you're going. Upgrade to the inexpensive and platform-defining TeleNav, and you'll find out why I can't leave home without its turn by turn directions called out by street name. My BlackBerry 8820's battery lasts forever compared to iPhone's. BlackBerry comes with a holster. BlackBerry handsets are available from all major US carriers, and they're subsidised. Even AT&T will amortise the cost of your BlackBerry device in return for a two year contract commitment. With iPhone, your two year contract commitment gets you list price, and you can shop around and pick any operator you like as long as it's AT&T.
Apple's favourite way to pin the grey beard on the BlackBerry is to point out that it uses indirect delivery. All messages, regardless of their origin or destination, are routed through BlackBerry's proprietary network. Every message makes a stop at Research In Motion's network operations centre in Canada (Jobs: "It's not even in this country!") before being sent to a handset or mail server. In contrast, Apple and AT&T give you a direct TCP/IP connection between an employee's iPhone and your company's Exchange Server. Jobs wonders why BlackBerry users aren't concerned about security, given that all messages are gathered on a central group of servers, a single point of failure, where unencrypted messages sit naked and vulnerable to anyone roaming around the BlackBerry NOC. Can Americans really trust those nosy Canadians with our sensitive email?
It's funny that Apple, fronting for AT&T, points to the privacy risks of shuttling communications across the border. Aren't there some hearings on Capitol Hill about warrantless something or other, and pleas for legal protection of telecommunications companies that too eagerly spilled the beans on subscribers? Security begins at home, eh?
Telecom will officially launch a WorldMode BlackBerry, its first BlackBerry offering, next week along with a WorldMode data roaming service.
One day after a service outage temporarily left BlackBerry users in North America without access to their email, Research In Motion said an initial investigation indicated that the outage was caused by problems with an internal data routing system that recently had been upgraded.
I was out at lunch the other day with an avid Blackberry user. He was showing off his new Curve, as gadget people are wont to do. He was clearly pretty chuffed with it, but then started to have the odd gripe, such as about how unintuitive some of the functions were (from memory, Mute was one of these).
Research in Motion has released a BlackBerry software package deigned for businesses with up to 30 wireless users.
Research In Motion (RIM) Monday released software designed to help businesses with up to 30 users get the same core wireless email and related functions from the BlackBerry Enterprise Server that larger companies and government organisations now get.
College parties met business e-mail on Wednesday as Facebook Inc. said it is adding its social-networking platform to Research In Motion Ltd.'s BlackBerry devices.
Auckland-based global positioning system component manufacturer Rakon is targeting the emerging market for consumer base stations, or “femtocells”.