Posts by Si

Steve Jobs unveils plans to dominate RIM BlackBerry, Life, the Universe, and Everything

Steve reinvents the wheel.....square

@bws - you "don't see BlackBerry supporting anything else other than its own service". Seeing that BlackBerry works with POP3 and IMAP in the consumer space and Exchange, Domino and GroupWise in the enterprise space you clearly have no clue what you're talking about.

The fact remains that, even if iPhone could do everything BlackBerry does as simply as BlackBerry does, it's still a massively expensive device with equally insane tariffing and network restrictions. If you're a business rolling out mobile email to 100, 200, 1000 users are you really going to purchase shiny expensive iPhones for them or functional cost effective BlackBerrys? Apple has a long long way to go to compete with the industry standard.

RIM out to patent BlackBerry slider

Well done

Congratulations to the Reg for reporting last weeks news! Less time playing online poker perhaps???

Nokia shutters German handset factory

Typical Eastern European rubbish

Like everything it's either going to China or to Eastern Europe (where the line workers are paid in chickens). When they said they were moving manufacturing to Eastern Europe I thought they meant the UK, as that's where most of them live now. Nice to see them taking jobs off those other than the Brits for a change. I won't be buying Nokia out of principal now, especially as the build quality is set for a nose dive. Nobody builds better than the Germans.

Microsoft versus BlackBerry versus, er, BlackBerry?

BlackBerry = greater management

I think the big concern for us was how much management we could have over our device fleet and how much control we could have over what our users do when we're not looking. Microsoft simply could not live up to our expectations in this arena. What we found with BlackBerry was that we could use IT policies on the BlackBerry server to prevent internet access and lock down many of the features which swelled data usage or meant users could be non productive with their equipment. The Windows Mobile solution with Exchange Direct Push provided us with none of that and this meant that our users could surf the internet all day long, using data for non work related things and that just wasn't good for us.

The arguement goes further because of the compression involved with BlackBerry and the fact that because of this mobile phone service providers could offer us fixed data packages. While there are large data bundles available for Windows Mobile, there was nothing which could prevent users simply exploiting this by downloading MP3's all day long and exceeding the bundled packages.

Without a need for middleware, the Direct Push route can be appealing, but the devices are expensive, complicated to use, have poor battery life and as we have seen, the ongoing costs can be huge. For us it's all about BlackBerry, at least for the forseeable future.